I received a new mp3 player this xmas. It is a Cowon iAudio X5 with a 60 gig hard drive. This replaced my iRiver ihp120 mp3 player which was a 20 gig. I now have 25 gigs of music so this was a timely xmas present. This player has some great features.
First feature I like is it plugs into any computer Windows, Mac or Linux thru usb2 with no software needed and the computer reads it as a plain jane external hard drive. I refuse to use an mp3 player that forces you to use software to load songs onto. You simply drag and drop your files onto the player and it retains the folder structure you laid out on your computer to organize your tunes. You just browse like you would any hard drive for the song you want and play it. If you organize your folders well like I do music is easy to find and I much prefer this then id3 database.
The player plays a wide range of formats mp3, wma, wav, the open source ogg and yeah baby the lossless flac format. I have a fair amount of flac files and I am glad this player plays this very good sounding format. I also have some ogg files.
The user interface is good. It is very close to the iriver so there was not much of a learning curve. I like the Cowon’s joystick better then the iriver’s joystick. It is very fast at scrolling thru folders. It is also easy to change settings such as equalizer, shuffle and so forth.
Other features it has is usb host where you can retrieve photos from your camera which is handy for storage in the field. FM radio which I like for listening to the Vols or the Mancow show. Photo viewer which I don’t use and it plays videos which I find to be a novelty though I have watched Star Trek from it.
Ok the most important thing the sound quality. I read many reviews on this before I suggested to my family this is the player I want for xmas. The sound had glowing reviews and I quickly learned this player was favored among audiophiles. I was not expecting what I heard when I first turned it on. Now my iriver has great sound and I expected the Cowen to be about the same or a tad better. The first song was 5 Long Years by Eric Clapton. I was shocked! The sound quality was excellent. Not as good as a nice Stereo system in your living room but excellent for a portable device. It is by far the best sounding mp3 player I have ever listened to and is better then any walkman or portable cd player I have heard. The sound quality is unbelievable.
The sound is very customizable with a user adjustable equalizer and it has bbe and mach3base. The earphones that I use is Shure E2c which is far better then the stock earbuds. I have Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (the whole thing over an hour) in flac format that I was not able to play in my iriver was fantastic in the Cowon.
For a portable audio player I couldn’t ask for anything more. It has a hard drive big enough to hold all my music from classical, blues, classic rock and heavy metal and sound quality that will bring tears to your eyes. I am thrilled with this player and it shows if you look hard enough there is better player then the over popular ipod.
