Cowon iAudio 7

In January 09 I lost my mobile phone, a Nokia 6267, which was good for listening music. It was not the top of the flagpole, but it did the job. After that, I got a Motorola RAZR2 V9. It was good for using it as a mobile phone, but I wanted a mobile phone which is also good in playing music, also with earphones. The Nokia had normal earphones connectors, you only had to use an adapter for the different sizes (2.5 => 3.5mm), but you could use your old headphones. The Motorola didn’t, you only got a Micro-USB headset which wasn’t very good for listening to music. So I wanted something better, without buying a new mobile phone, because I didn’t have the money for a good one. So I got the idea of buying a MP3-player. The advantage was that you get a device which was made for listening to music, not only a device which supports it as a feature. I asked a friend who’s listening much to music. He recommended the Cowon iAudio 7 to me, so I bought it after reading some reviews.

I bought the 16GB version, because I’ve got much music. I packed some music on it, turned it on and I was just impressed. I’ve never heard a bass like this and sound clear like this, especially from a mobile device. The BBE improves the sound quality of compressed MP3 files, a good explanation can be found here: http://www.cowonglobal.com/product_wide/product_bbe.php

Now it’s getting colder outside (I’m using it mostly on my way to work) and I’m not sure if it’s because of that, or if it’s just wear marks: The touch buttons are sometimes not responding. This can be fixed by turning it some times in standby mode (Screen off, music still playing). Most of the time, it works again after doing it once. Except that, I’ve never had any problems with it, it just worked fine.

The device is very much configurable. You can control much of the sound play, not only by an equalizer, but rather with an extended version. You can control the level of BBE sound improvement (too much sounds weird), the level of the Mach3Bass (I have it set to a low level and it’s still strong enough) and some things like that. By the way, the loudness is very good. I set it to the highest level almost never.

Most MP3 players play MP3 (Oh, really?!) or even WMA, WAV and sometimes OGG. If you like listening to music on the highest quality level, you probably use FLAC. FLAC is a file type which plays sound in the highest possible quality level (depending on the source material), so it’s really the sound you’re hearing on CD, nothing ripped away. You can see this in the bit rate, mostly they got a bit rate of about 1050kbps. By way of comparison: MP3s are limited to 320kbps, if they are in the specifications. I know, most of you won’t hear a difference between them and you need very good earphones to hear it, but it’s a good feature to have if you like to listen to the very best quality. You have to remember, that a FLAC file is about 30MB big, so you can’t have too much on your device. It plays ASF files too, if you need them.

It’s a very good device if you have got enough money. I recommend you to buy good earphones, I’ve got the Sony MDR-V150. The battery life of about 60h is very good, I’ve never ran out of energy unexpectedly, because I’m plugging it to the computer for packing some new songs on it, and then it’s charging the battery pack.