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Average user rating:
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Full user review
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5.0 stars
"3rd COWON product and 19th media player! FIRST one rated 10 by me!"
Pros: ULTIMATE format support, Superior Sound Quality!
Cons: 5 hour bettery life playing DivX 720*480!
Summary: As a musician and electronics enthusiast, the first player that astonished me with its superior sound quality was the iRiver iFP-780 using a Philips chipset. Soon after, I discovered it¡¯s competitor COWON, which I selected a U3 as my first player from COWON¡¯s line of products. The sound quality is on the same level of iRiver¡¯s! The second player I used from COWON is the iAudio 6 which featured an .85in HD which I am still using sometimes now, by that time I do not think any MP3 player can succeed the quality of sound playing 192kbps 44kHz audio files. I WAS WRONG!
Soon after the COWON A3 was released, I took the liberty to purchase one from my friend in Korea. Some people might mistake the A2 to be almost on the same level as the A3! They ONLY look the same on the outside! Three years of development, COWON made some HUGE advancements. The screen resolution of the A3 is boosted to 800*480 while the A2 stayed at 480*272! Using a pair of Shuge SE530, I can hear the difference between the sound quality of the iAudio 6 and A3 playing the SAME 192kbps 44kHz song! A fully rendered SOLID bass and treble is heard clearly unaltered with the A3 while the iAudio 6 seems to ¡°fake¡± some of the frequencies even though the iAudio 6 is already keeping a much higher quality of sound compared to Apple iPods and many other leading MP3/PMPs out there. Some of you may know the A3 DOES NOT use a simple Telechips processor (A2 used) anymore! A3 moved on to use a DM6441 Texas Instrument Dual-Core processor which has a.513Mhz DSP core and a 256Mhz ARM core, unbeatable! Most of my videos do not have to be re-encoded to be played on the A3, including Xvid and H.264. The support of H.264 videos are NOT 1280*720, rather lowered to 720*480. Only some Xvid and DivX version 5/6 can play at 1280*720, but the audio track tends to go out of sync playing files with this resolution. (All based on 30FPS) But still, all files at or under 800*480 play fine EXCEPT DivX version 3.11 which ALSO lags the audio out of sync.
Compared with any PMP out there, this is the ultimate PMP at least until mid 2008!
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