I'm not an expert on this but afaik sony does the decoding in hardware on the consoles. The format was popular for their minidiscs as well, and it's apparently very good quality-wise, at least if you use their tools to decompress. Open source implementation in ffmpeg is notably worse based on my lim...

Not sure if you guys are still looking into it, but fwiw I spent some time trying to reverse engineer the ATRAC3 audio encoding and released a version of psxtract that is now able to fully recover all tracks including audio from retail EBOOT.PBP files. I'm leaning on the at3tool to do the actual dec...