MP3 Players Review

Cowon A3-60SL 60GB Portable Media Player (Silver)

Customer Reviews

Stunning PMP

I have had my eye on the Cowan A2 for quite some time, and when I was ready to purchase it, i saw the A3 was out, wow what an awesome PMP! Great battery life, beautiful picture, excellent sound with lots of enhancements. I can't say enough about this media player, it is probably the most satisfying purchase I have made in years.

For True Audiophiles. Hands Down the most feature packed & best Sounding player for the $$

It even makes poor quality mp3 sounds great when I hook it up to my living room speakers where there's no where for poorly encoded mp3s to hide, unlike on small headphones which have no range in frequency (highs & lows) you know? You can tweak the sound with the many EQ, bass settings and Digital Signal Processing (DSP)fields like Rock, Jazz etc. you'll freak. IT has Line-In Recording which is a huge plus for me. The picture quality is equally amazing near HD quality. It is not for the faint of heart, only for true audiophiles providing freedom for music lovers. It's even a portable Digital Video recorder as it can record from the TV etc. It's a god send. It plays virtually all types of media files. No proprietary software needed (crappy I tunes). It is a little hefty but it isn't meant to be for those on the run as much. For that purpose, I suggest the little 2 or 4 gigs ones. This puppy I believe is for extended travel perhaps to watch a movie on when you are away and for the jukebox feature of hooking it up to my audio-visual system. It even has a built in alarm clock!! The company provides firmware upgrades too so the battery life is higher than the reviews.

Very good - yet has flaws.

Pros: Beautiful HD Screen, reasonable hours of play, GREAT (!!!) format support - just throw it into the device and it'll play. comfortable, light weight even on 60GB version, wide subtitles support, great menu language support. can use it as TiVo. You can connect it to a TV and watch good quality movies. Reading small documents is cool. Supports BBE so your music will sound FANTASTIC! Cons: For First, and HD support is a lie. it WONT support most x264 files. Some devices has a problem with its volume (too low), some don't, and can't be fixed with firmware. plus COWON are not even aware of this problem so...don't count on your volume to be very high. The way you search music is just plain stupid, you can only see the filename. you can't sort the files by Band or by Album, so you have to make your own directories for each band, which can be annoying when you have 30GB of singles on your Cowon. No gapless playback - you gotta listen of The Dark Side Of The Moon with about 3-4 seconds gap between each track. No Thumbnails view for the pictures, and it will only zoom x4. No case for the device (cheapest I found is 30$). No Wi-Fi, but who needs this $h1t on the go, right? Conclusion: It's a good device, but don't sell your soul to the devil for this. Little advice: since it supports FLAC format don't forget to buy atleast entry level headphones for it - those earbuds suck.

Cowon A3 - If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...

If this player performed as advertised and did everything it was supposed to, it would easily rate five stars. Unfortunately, it has a few MAJOR flaws and several minor ones, which Cowon does not seem to be addressing through firmware improvements. I bought the A3 for the purpose of playing music, so for nearly four hundred dollars that's what I expect it to do perfectly. Unfortunately it falls far short of perfection. First, the good points: The sound quality is great. I own two other mp3 players - an IRiver, which has extremely poor sound quality, and a Cowon F2 which has good sound quality, but not as good as the A3's. The graphic equalizer works well. The "Jet effect" sound enhancement features are useless if you're using a good pair of headphones. When you turn the volume up loud there's no distortion. (With the F2, too much bass will cause major distortion at medium to high volume.) 60GB seems to be plenty of storage for music. I use high-quality mp3 files (256+ kbps) because I can't hear any difference between that format and the original CD. I put almost 3,000 songs on the A3 and only used up about half the available storage space. (Remember, ALL manufacturers including Cowon lie about hard disk capacity. The A3 actually only has about 54GB of storage.) File transfer is reasonably fast - probably as good as it gets for this type of device. And speaking of transferring files, there are no artificial restrictions. This is no Ipod. Cowon doesn't force their customers to jump through any hoops to use their products. You can change the wallpaper as often as you like, change the startup and shutdown screen, and play your songs as many times as you wish without the manufacturer trying to squeeze more money out of you. I use the A3 mostly while driving. It can handle normal driving conditions and road bumps fine without skipping. Although I use the A3 almost exclusively to listen to music it is nice to have other capabilities available. The picture viewer is very good. I uploaded a few photos that were already sized for the A3's screen (800 x 480 pixels) and they looked fine. The zoom feature works very well - the photos still looked sharp when magnified. The display quality is good for LCD, but when I compared a photo on the A3 to the same photo on my computer's CRT display the A3 appeared washed out and flat. However, the A3's display is perfectly acceptable for its primary function of navigating menu items. In fact, it's very impressive. The joystick works fine for me. I have large hands and have very little trouble manipulating it. Cowon's on-line technical support is pretty good. The technicians seem to be reasonably competent and they do try to help. However, they aren't interested in documenting the A3's many bugs and passing the information on to Cowon's programmers and technicians. It's great to have .flac support. Now for the bad points: There are three huge flaws in the A3. First, there's often a loud pop between songs. I verified the pops weren't actually part of the mp3 files. I contacted Cowon about the pops and they didn't have an answer. The second major flaw is that there's always a pause between songs. That might be a nice feature when listening to random songs, but it's very annoying when listening to a CD in which the tracks are supposed to blend together. Also, the pause isn't silent - there are always two or three small pops between each song (different from the loud pops mentioned above). There's no way to disable the pause. I guess the only way around it would be to encode albums in one large file instead of separate tracks. I really don't want to spend a few days re-encoding dozens of CDs. The third major flaw is poor video playback. The A3 supports lots of file formats, but after spending many hours trying to figure out what the A3 will play correctly and what it won't, I've pretty much given up on watching high-quality videos. The A3 is able to play SOME low-quality files without any problems. I spent several hours trying to get my three favorite DVD-quality music videos (which play perfectly on the computer) to play on the A3 without success. The A3 also has problems with some music file formats. I have a few .ape files, which the A3 would not play at all. The .ape files caused an error message stating "Compression is too high." I re-encoded the songs at a lower compression setting. The A3 then played them, but skipped every few seconds. No .mp3's by "Queensrÿche" will play. The "ÿ" causes problems for the A3. Some other problems are also present. It's very difficult to locate a file in a large list. For example, I have one folder that contains about 2,000 songs. Locating a specific song is very time consuming and frustrating because of the way the scroll bar works. Adjusting the "Jet Effect" settings (equalization, BBE, etc.) while music is playing can cause the A3 to suddenly turn itself off. The A3 doesn't use the same type of USB plug as other Cowon devices. Since I use a Cowon F2 frequently as well, it would be nice to be able to connect both of them using the same cable so I wouldn't have to switch cables all the time. Connecting the A3 to the computer can be tricky. The instructions indicate you should use the USB ports on the back of your computer. I found this to be true. Connecting the A3 to the USB port on the front of my computer did not work, and caused problems with an external USB drive connected to the back port. The quality of construction is average. The only noticeable flaw is that the unit does not sit flat. It will rock back and forth slightly when placed on a flat surface. In my opinion the firmware is beta quality. Hopefully Cowon will get their act together soon. The fact that a nearly $400 device generates all the skips, pops, and pauses that it does is almost unbelievable. But it's still better than an Ipod or any Microsoft product. I can't imagine what life would be like if all the appliances in my home were as poorly programmed as this device. Here's a helpful tip: The A3 scales album cover images to 180 x 180 pixels. If you assign the top left corner of the A3's screen the x, y coordinates 0, 0, the album cover images fill the area from 81, 99 to 260, 278. I pre-scaled all my album cover images to 176 x 176, then added a one-pixel-wide white border around the outside, then a one-pixel-wide black border. That looks very sharp. (I'll post a sample as a customer image.) Another helpful tip: You can create your own startup and shutdown screen image to replace the Cowon logo. This isn't documented in the instructions. Here's how: Make an 800 x 480 picture. Convert it to an 8-bit 256-color .bmp file (I used IrfanView - load your picture, select "Image," "Decrease Color Depth," "256 Colors." Make sure the "Use Floyd-Steinberg dithering" box is checked. Click "Ok." Save the picture as a .bmp file.) Rename your file "A3_LOGO" with no extension. The size of this file should be 377KB. Then, follow the steps to upgrade the firmware with this exception: Replace the "A3_LOGO" file in the firmware archive with your "A3_LOGO" file before completing the firmware upgrade. You can also delete the "\Photo\Logo" directory on the A3 since the image will be stored in memory from now on. Follow up: I did some file format comparisons and found more problems. There are so many bugs in the A3 that hoping a firmware upgrade will fix things is like hoping the next version of Microsoft Windows won't have any bugs. The reality is that Cowon is concentrating on adding more features instead of fixing the ones that are already there. After using this device daily for a couple months and trying lots of things with it, I'm convinced that a lot of the A3's problems are a result of a slow microprocessor. That would explain the sluggish response time, the inability to play .ape files (which take more processor time to decode than .mp3 or .flac), and the inability to play high-quality videos. No firmware upgrade will ever overcome slow processor speed. In spite of the A3's many flaws, I still think it's the best of its type even if it will never be perfect, and I don't regret purchasing it.

Cowon A3 Customer Review

Audio and video playing are very good. Will play .avi no problem. Audio sound enhancement is also very good. User interface needs improvement. Battery lasts about 4 hours for video and 6-7 hours for audio. The hard drive will cause skipping with harsh movements, i.e., anything other than walking. Softwares that can be used with player are not all included. Full softwares require additional fee. The player does heat up if put inside a pocket. Too bad there aren't any exposable carrying case with backpack straps for secure carrying and heat dissipation. However, if video and audio quality is your primary purpose, I don't think there is anything better on the market. If this player drops its price to $250, I can't see anyone buying anything else in the same category.

Keyword : cowon