Hercules;199950 Wrote: > At the moment, I quite like the look of the Cowon iAudio X5, and can't > really see any viable competitors... Perhaps, though, I have missed > some other players?
I bought the Cowon D2 and UE super.fi 5 IEMs. The D2 does not have the built-in capacity of the X5, but if you don't mind carrying some extra SDHC cards; storage capacity is not an issue. newegg had Transcend 8GB SDHC cards for $59.99, but they raised the price recently. I bought two of these SDHC cards to hold my Jazz and World Music libraries. The built-in memory holds those songs that I can not live without and all my gym mixes. With all hard-drive based players there are issues of wear/tear (reliability), noise and battery life (high power consumption) because the of the moving parts of the hard drive. Hard-drive based player are not very practical either... if you want to use them while performing physically challenging activities like exercising at gym, biking or hicking. Before the D2 I had a Rio Karma that sounded just as good as the D2, but it was hard-drive based and it died a while ago after giving me some headaches. I also had a Frontier Labs Nex II CF-based that I recently lost. I had the Nex II for over 5 years and it never failed me. To me it is obvious that the future of the portable DAP market is with Flash Memory. When Apple came out with the first Nano with 2GB Flash... the hard-drive based "6GB" mini, for all intended purposes, ceased to exist. The nano is very practical, but the sound quality and flexibility is not there. Not to mention that you won't catch me dead carrying one of those things. The D2 supports FLAC, but I find that for portable DAPs a high quality lossy format is the way to go. Lossless FLAC just takes too much space. I convert a subset of my FLAC 1.1.4 library that I use for my SB3 to MP3s using dBpwowerAMP batch converter with the latest Lame encoder VBR -V 2 new "standard". With the batch converter of dBpowerAMP R12 Reference I select all the tracks I want to convert from my FLAC library to MP3s click convert and walk away. The folder structure and all my tags (including embedded album art), are converted without a hitch. For those FLAC albums for which dBpowerAMP ripper fails to find the album art, I use MP3TAG 2.8 which supports the new tags supported by FLAC 1.1.4. Since I have a large world music library, Album Art is very impotant to me. It is hard to search for the name albums/songs that I want to hear, but whose name I can not spell or understand. MP3s with embedded album art work great with the D2. The Cowon D2 is not fully cooked yet and is not open source, but its firmware gets updated frequently with new features and bug fixes. The Cowon/iAudio community at iAudiophile.net is very helpful and is frequented by technically skilled folks just like in this user group. The D2 has a high resolution touch screen interface, it has a small form factor, supports many file formats including video. is flash-based and the sounds quality compares to that of the X5. Don't take my word for itÂ… do a little research. I always thought of the X5 as the best replacement for my Rio Karma, but once I lost my Nex II... I found that the Cowon D2 was the perfect replacement for both. -- tamanaco ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tamanaco's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4620 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35043
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