My OperaCowon T2
Thursday, August 9, 2007 7:41:50 AM
The Cowon T2 player is a small "necklace" audio player. It isn't the size of a regular necklace pendant, much larger - a small 80's- (or 70's?-)styled black box.
It is intended as a "PC companion" player, not as a standalone player with an entire music collection. The player didn't come with an AC adapter - it is charged by USB connection (two hours for a full charge).
It is intended as a "PC companion" player, not as a standalone player with an entire music collection. The player didn't come with an AC adapter - it is charged by USB connection (two hours for a full charge).
The player's management suite is required only for copying DRM-crippled music files. Otherwise it is recognised as an external storage device with any OS. If an OS can mount a USB flash drive, it can work with the Cowon T2 player. Sound quality is quite good for a small player. It still sounds a tad compressed compared with the Audigy-2 soundcard of the host computer, or the Texas Instruments card of the Apple notebook. But it is very rich with detail, definition is much better than of many other such devices. The earphones that came with the player are nothing special - regular "pill"-type earphones that beg for replacement. They are (obviously) more energy-efficient than the Panasonic RP-HT357 cups (saturated at 32/40 volume setting), but they are unfair to this little player's sound quality. Unfortunately, if the earphones are removed, the player loses its necklace mount. The player is lightweight enough to sit on a folded headphones' cord, but only the included earphones' connector can be locked. The quoted A-weighted signal-to-signal-noise ratio is 95 dB, which is as good as most current soundcards (yes, Creative does state a 114 dB or better ratio for its SB Audigy series, but that's a marketing exaggeration). The player does, indeed, sound like it. Quoted sound range is 20-20000 Hz (not tested to be confirmed yet), and it does sound like it, somewhat compressed but clean. It is better in any case than Sony consumer electronics' dreadful 40-18000 bandpass. The player can accept MP3/Wave/OGG/WMA files of up to 48 KHz. No AAC or FLAC support. MP3 playback was flawless, OGG playback had shuffling noises, indicating OGG support was included posthaste, to a decoding engine designed for MP3. The noise level is relatively low, masked completely with louder OGG files, but it is noticeable in quiet passages. The player's flash drive (real capacity about 1.8 GB) speed is excellent, up to par with the host Seagate Barracuda 312-GB drive's speed. Writing multiple files at once slows it down, but not to the point of not responding at all, as it could be with a regular flash drive. It's also free of latency problems/seek delays some flash drives have. The player's DSP is perhaps the most attractive feature, it has a real (that is, user-adjustable) equaliser, a "bass expansion" feature (really unnecessary, as the sound output is clear and full as-is), a "3D surround" mode (untested), and the gem - the "MPEnhance" DSP algorithm that compensates for the dampened and suppressed sound spectrum of poorly-encoded (or low-bitrate) compressed files. It doesn't, of course, magically remove all artefacts or make everything sound perfectly clean, but it does make instruments (strings, harps, bells, anything reliant on mid-high frequencies for definition) stand out and sound like themselves in an otherwise murky and distorted piece. It even gives them some character. It can sound somewhat synthetic, but it's the kind, warm synthetic sounding, not the distorted and cold one. Battery time is stated as 12 hours with the display not used a lot. With the RP-HT357 headphones (which have an impedance of 16 Ohm, just like the native earphones) it would be in the region of 6-8 hours. For the "PC companion" role of the player, that's perfectly fine - it also charges rather quickly. The controls can be a bit tricky, as there's no mechanical cue (notch or rivet) on any buttons. The player's controlled with six buttons - [skip] forward/backward, play on the top side, and [volume] -/+ and "menu" on the bottom. The six buttons are identical, so in a pocket or a bag they are easily confused. The GUI is pretty straightforward - an hierarchical menu system, a playback status, and a file browser (the file browser, by the way, only shows music files and directories). Files can be deleted or added to the "dynamic playlist", but not moved or copied. A delayed [Menu]-button pressed on a highlighted file or menu item invokes the context menu. Unlike Apple players, the file manager also has a file-only mode where it will display the files and directories, not the album/artist entries. Which is great for files whose tags couldn't be read. There was an oddity with UTF-8 ID3v2 tags where Chinese characters were displayed instead of Cyrillic text. It also couldn't read regular CP-1251 tags in Cyrillic, but it did display Cyrillic filenames properly. The LCD is bright and clear, its default brightness value of 8 was enough for sunny daylight. Overall, the player is a good run for the money, it sounds good, even "tasty", its only three drawbacks are the lack of FLAC playback, the problems with Cyrillic (and most likely any other national writing - Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), and the restriction of its necklace to the earphones it came with. A lock/headphone jack holder mechanism, or a necklace grabber for headphones, would be an easy fix. It could also use riveted buttons. And yes, it does beat the Apple competition by features ("not being restricted to ITunes for file copy" is one of them) and sound quality.
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