kenta
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[size=medium]Review Cowon iAudio A3 with reference to Etymotic ER-4P and Sony MDR-EX90SP[/size]
Hardware:
1. Cowon iAudio A3 60GB (firmware 1.23A)
2. Etymotic ER-4P
3. Sony MRD-EX90SP
Prologue,
After possess the A3 for a month and extensive more than 150 hours of hearing all kind of music and videos with it, I suppose, I have some aspects to share with Head-fier, something which I couldn’t find from reviews over the internet. I believe it should be very useful in some manners to someone who is considering buying an A3 with the same set-up like me.
To begin with, I moved from Creative Zen Vision 30 GB to Cowon iAudio A3 because of serious accident to my Creative Zen Vision. Creative Zen Vision is impressive to me in many ways and I still love it. The sound is rather warm compare to A3 with easy-to-use GUI and lovely creative-signatured sound quality. The sound signature can be described as warm, medium sound-stage (e.g. in large living room or club), roll-off bass with some punchy but nothing quite that spectacular. Yet still the medium to high is well balanced but will not accurately separate the singer from the band well. Some limitations with audio and video format is also an issue, as it does not support any loss-less or high-bandwidth MP3 (>320kbps). And video play back is limit to mostly avi and needs a lot conversion to fit the standard support. Anyway the screen of Creative Zen Vision and overall quality is really good with reasonable battery-life of around 10 hours audio.
First sight,
After waiting for a while for the availability in Germany - at first grace with A3, I was satisfied with the whole package. It is well made with decent amount of accessories. I switched it on and felt suddenly disappointed with the sound. Luckily I have tested another A3 at an electronic store with my own ER-4P and heard far better sound from it. So I left it burned-in for 1 day non-stop, thereafter its sound felt much much better, and familiar to the one I tried in the store. After a week, then I thought burn-in is done and A3 is ready to prove its capability.
Burn-in is may necessary for A3
I will not try to explain about GUI, its spec and so on as you can find anywhere over the internet, but as a direct user’s experience I wish to share with you. A3 promises so many and claims to be extreme portable multimedia player (PMP) which I think; it is still far from it. Not because it can not do everything, but because it fells some promises it claims. On the good side, it seems to exceed my expectation in some areas or even give me another hi-fi perspective from a PMP. So here is what I found.
Sound Quality with Etymotic ER-4P,
I shall begin with what I admire about A3. The sound quality and features are in every way exceed my expectation, better and more defined than Creative Zen Vision. And of course, leaves un-amped current iPod family quite behind. I setup the A3 with mainly Etymotic ER-4P without an extra amp. A3 seems to get along well with it and enhances the bright side of ER-4P very well. A3 with ER-4P can be described as – airy and open soundstage with each instrument being separately placed near you. Its sounding is well balanced from low to high. As it is the character of ER-4P to have roll-off bass, it shows with A3 setup as well. With ER-4P the texture of tone and dynamics are there, acoustic guitar or a choir is well separated and can be seen or tell of their existing rather than mixed up or muddy. What I found really amazing is discrete details of the each instrument are supremely clear, piece by piece but still build up an image of the whole band staying in front of you. It does not lie to you about the image, but instead shows you what really is.
It lives up my Sony,…
With Sony MDR-EX90SP also impresses me. I have a slightly modified EX90SP as mentioned in one of famous DIY-thread here. Of course, the characteristic of EX90SP is naturally more bass compared to ER-4P. To me ER-4P performs excellently on A3 with Jazz, classic, ballad or one with high details and texture. ER-4P might not be a good choice for pop, rock which requires amount of bass. EX90SP is rather a bit too muddy for my liking. With A3 it performs nicer than it was with Zen Vision. On the same songs I tried with ER-4P, I can see the image of the singer is pushed back to her band and mixed up. Soundstage is still open but the alignment of each instrument is not that clear. They stand together just like a group of street musicians rather than performance in a concert hall. Still the quality from Sony on A3 is nice. A3 makes this Sony sound interesting for me than before.
Sound improving features,…
EQ: 10-band fully customizable with selectable frequency bandwidth
BBE and MP: Enhance the lost harmonic in high frequency
Mach3Bass: Bass Enhancer
3D Surround: Soundstage widen
These 5 features are given for you to customize your music experience. To be honest, they do can. 10-band EQ can fine tune both my ER-4P and EX90SP very well and precisely correct the frequency range where I want.
For ER-4P; I would recommend to try BBE at 3, Mach3Bass at 3, MP is on, while forget 3D Sound at 0. This improves roll-off bass side of ER-4P dramatically and not mudding its sound. I am satisfied with the result. Yet, the extend-bass characteristic of ER-4P is still there. I feel that the drummer plays better and livelier rather than just volume up the microphone for his instrument and ruin the whole balance of the band. BBE makes the high pit and medium to have more detail and discrete. Forget 3D Surround as it ruins the beautiful soundstage of ER-4P while it tries to push back the whole things far from you and place them near together.
For EX90SP; BBE at 3, Mach3Bass at 1, MP is on and 3D Surround at 2. BBE enhances well the medium and high of this Sony to stand out clearer. MP extends the music bandwidth more and corrects the lost harmonic of percussion and singer or the lovely sound of violin. 3D Surround here gives the Sony a better soundstage somewhat, which to my ear I prefer this to turn on but just a bit. This setting improves EX90SP to be better defined and balance Mach3Bass let the muddy bass more punchy.
Set too much of these features can lead to unnatural sound and feel electronically generated. They are not perfect and will not suit every song. Please play around with them, before decide that they are all not useful. I would recommend from my experience to use them often but at low level setting. Another notice is BBE and MP functions work not quite well with the low bandwidth files, e.g. 128 kbps MP3. To me, it fells to simulate natural lost harmonic, but to be frank the files are already bad from the beginning. It works nicely with 320kbps MP3 or above.
In conclude, A3 is quite neutral and let the headphone plays its roll freely. If compare A3 as a conductor and the headphone is a musician, A3 conducts very accurate and let the musician plays with their own styles. As well as if the musicians’ performance does not suit your liking A3 can let them play more clearly by set up those sound-turning features. A3 can conduct the drummer to play tighter while let guitarist shows off more of his skill as he is playing around with classic guitar and violinist plays a bit more dynamics.
Things to complain about sounding are not many. As I mention, A3 might give a good sound or better the output of your music experience by tweaking the sound improving features. Also the features give plenty of possibilities; you can possibly get the sound you like. Unlike many players which stay with its sounding style, A3 is a lot more flexible to range of headphones and blends itself well to each individual owner.
WMA seems to have problem on A3,..
Almost every music format is supported, this is what Cowon says. To me, partly it is true. “flac”, “ogg”, “mp3” plays flawlessly on A3. But WMA will find A3 not a good partner. It seems WMA meets a difficulty to be played on A3 correctly. With current firmware 1.23A, I have experienced skips, short pausing or even stop playing with loss-less WMA files. Strange it is that each 1st song in the album in lossless WMA format will not play while the less in the album will. So the solution is to start with the 2nd song in the album and rewind back to the 1st one and A3 will play. Another experience with WMA is the sound seems to be poorer than the other format. Some might argue that WMA format is not from the beginning the format suits for hi-fi, but at least the same songs sound good to me on Creative Zen Vision, but not on A3. As well as those sound improving features seem not to work but worsen the sound of WMAs. The features work fine and really well with any other formats.
Video quality is arguable the best available from a PMP.
Cowon manages to make A3 plays almost video format in the world, and I have to admit it does. It fells just only the claim to play HD media. As it does not mentioned clearly in the spec-sheet or in its advertisement, buyer can think it plays perfectly HD media. But indeed it plays on low-profile HD.264 with maximum resolution lower than 720p, and anyhow it can not plays 720p low-profile HD.264 smoothly. It pauses time to time with frame-rate below 5fps. Anyway this is still the best PMP that try to play just every format and most of them with success. If you like download video files from internet which normally comes with 100 various type of compression to help internet download time, you will sure love A3. Just throw them to A3 and it will plays 98% of them without problem accept for HD.264 format. It is fair to credit Cowon on firmware continuously improves the A3 playability, but it is still not match the phase it claims in the advertisement. Worth another mention is the talent to play subtitle, it gives even function to set which color of the subtitle it shows.
So I use it everyday, …
I take the A3 with me most of the time I go out. It is huge and not comfortable to leave in any pocket of my suite. Battery-life is not a big concern for me, as I have anyway about 2 hours of time to listen to it during the day. So it let me every 3 days to recharge it. A3 plays well office documents, word, powerpoint or pdf. I’ve just moved to Munich and still can not remember the route of subway. I put a complete timetable, route plan, etc in A3 and can easily look at them when I need. The usability, comfort and so on maybe less than iPod or anything, but whenever you demand the best quality of sound or flexibility to read ton of formats you will depend on A3 for sure. I also photograph seriously and use some decent DSLRs that require 13MB of space to store each pictures. A3 comes to be my lovely assistance as it connect directly to my Canon DSLR and load pictures from my CF. A3 plays anything from jpg to Canon own RAW (.CR2) format without any delay. Anyhow I found that it fells to connect with my Canon 5D while the others are fine. I don’t know why, but it just does not work.
Last thought,…
I like this A3. I admire and adore its capabilities. It proves itself to be one of my most useful tool I have to have everyday in my pocket. If you consider buying a PMP with those extra features (USB host, document support) etc, I think PMP is worth for you. It comes with high price tag but … if you use all the features just like me, you will not find anything better than A3.
Feedback and discuss is totally opened and thanks for all head-fier
Hardware:
1. Cowon iAudio A3 60GB (firmware 1.23A)
2. Etymotic ER-4P
3. Sony MRD-EX90SP
Prologue,
After possess the A3 for a month and extensive more than 150 hours of hearing all kind of music and videos with it, I suppose, I have some aspects to share with Head-fier, something which I couldn’t find from reviews over the internet. I believe it should be very useful in some manners to someone who is considering buying an A3 with the same set-up like me.
To begin with, I moved from Creative Zen Vision 30 GB to Cowon iAudio A3 because of serious accident to my Creative Zen Vision. Creative Zen Vision is impressive to me in many ways and I still love it. The sound is rather warm compare to A3 with easy-to-use GUI and lovely creative-signatured sound quality. The sound signature can be described as warm, medium sound-stage (e.g. in large living room or club), roll-off bass with some punchy but nothing quite that spectacular. Yet still the medium to high is well balanced but will not accurately separate the singer from the band well. Some limitations with audio and video format is also an issue, as it does not support any loss-less or high-bandwidth MP3 (>320kbps). And video play back is limit to mostly avi and needs a lot conversion to fit the standard support. Anyway the screen of Creative Zen Vision and overall quality is really good with reasonable battery-life of around 10 hours audio.
First sight,
After waiting for a while for the availability in Germany - at first grace with A3, I was satisfied with the whole package. It is well made with decent amount of accessories. I switched it on and felt suddenly disappointed with the sound. Luckily I have tested another A3 at an electronic store with my own ER-4P and heard far better sound from it. So I left it burned-in for 1 day non-stop, thereafter its sound felt much much better, and familiar to the one I tried in the store. After a week, then I thought burn-in is done and A3 is ready to prove its capability.
Burn-in is may necessary for A3
I will not try to explain about GUI, its spec and so on as you can find anywhere over the internet, but as a direct user’s experience I wish to share with you. A3 promises so many and claims to be extreme portable multimedia player (PMP) which I think; it is still far from it. Not because it can not do everything, but because it fells some promises it claims. On the good side, it seems to exceed my expectation in some areas or even give me another hi-fi perspective from a PMP. So here is what I found.
Sound Quality with Etymotic ER-4P,
I shall begin with what I admire about A3. The sound quality and features are in every way exceed my expectation, better and more defined than Creative Zen Vision. And of course, leaves un-amped current iPod family quite behind. I setup the A3 with mainly Etymotic ER-4P without an extra amp. A3 seems to get along well with it and enhances the bright side of ER-4P very well. A3 with ER-4P can be described as – airy and open soundstage with each instrument being separately placed near you. Its sounding is well balanced from low to high. As it is the character of ER-4P to have roll-off bass, it shows with A3 setup as well. With ER-4P the texture of tone and dynamics are there, acoustic guitar or a choir is well separated and can be seen or tell of their existing rather than mixed up or muddy. What I found really amazing is discrete details of the each instrument are supremely clear, piece by piece but still build up an image of the whole band staying in front of you. It does not lie to you about the image, but instead shows you what really is.
It lives up my Sony,…
With Sony MDR-EX90SP also impresses me. I have a slightly modified EX90SP as mentioned in one of famous DIY-thread here. Of course, the characteristic of EX90SP is naturally more bass compared to ER-4P. To me ER-4P performs excellently on A3 with Jazz, classic, ballad or one with high details and texture. ER-4P might not be a good choice for pop, rock which requires amount of bass. EX90SP is rather a bit too muddy for my liking. With A3 it performs nicer than it was with Zen Vision. On the same songs I tried with ER-4P, I can see the image of the singer is pushed back to her band and mixed up. Soundstage is still open but the alignment of each instrument is not that clear. They stand together just like a group of street musicians rather than performance in a concert hall. Still the quality from Sony on A3 is nice. A3 makes this Sony sound interesting for me than before.
Sound improving features,…
EQ: 10-band fully customizable with selectable frequency bandwidth
BBE and MP: Enhance the lost harmonic in high frequency
Mach3Bass: Bass Enhancer
3D Surround: Soundstage widen
These 5 features are given for you to customize your music experience. To be honest, they do can. 10-band EQ can fine tune both my ER-4P and EX90SP very well and precisely correct the frequency range where I want.
For ER-4P; I would recommend to try BBE at 3, Mach3Bass at 3, MP is on, while forget 3D Sound at 0. This improves roll-off bass side of ER-4P dramatically and not mudding its sound. I am satisfied with the result. Yet, the extend-bass characteristic of ER-4P is still there. I feel that the drummer plays better and livelier rather than just volume up the microphone for his instrument and ruin the whole balance of the band. BBE makes the high pit and medium to have more detail and discrete. Forget 3D Surround as it ruins the beautiful soundstage of ER-4P while it tries to push back the whole things far from you and place them near together.
For EX90SP; BBE at 3, Mach3Bass at 1, MP is on and 3D Surround at 2. BBE enhances well the medium and high of this Sony to stand out clearer. MP extends the music bandwidth more and corrects the lost harmonic of percussion and singer or the lovely sound of violin. 3D Surround here gives the Sony a better soundstage somewhat, which to my ear I prefer this to turn on but just a bit. This setting improves EX90SP to be better defined and balance Mach3Bass let the muddy bass more punchy.
Set too much of these features can lead to unnatural sound and feel electronically generated. They are not perfect and will not suit every song. Please play around with them, before decide that they are all not useful. I would recommend from my experience to use them often but at low level setting. Another notice is BBE and MP functions work not quite well with the low bandwidth files, e.g. 128 kbps MP3. To me, it fells to simulate natural lost harmonic, but to be frank the files are already bad from the beginning. It works nicely with 320kbps MP3 or above.
In conclude, A3 is quite neutral and let the headphone plays its roll freely. If compare A3 as a conductor and the headphone is a musician, A3 conducts very accurate and let the musician plays with their own styles. As well as if the musicians’ performance does not suit your liking A3 can let them play more clearly by set up those sound-turning features. A3 can conduct the drummer to play tighter while let guitarist shows off more of his skill as he is playing around with classic guitar and violinist plays a bit more dynamics.
Things to complain about sounding are not many. As I mention, A3 might give a good sound or better the output of your music experience by tweaking the sound improving features. Also the features give plenty of possibilities; you can possibly get the sound you like. Unlike many players which stay with its sounding style, A3 is a lot more flexible to range of headphones and blends itself well to each individual owner.
WMA seems to have problem on A3,..
Almost every music format is supported, this is what Cowon says. To me, partly it is true. “flac”, “ogg”, “mp3” plays flawlessly on A3. But WMA will find A3 not a good partner. It seems WMA meets a difficulty to be played on A3 correctly. With current firmware 1.23A, I have experienced skips, short pausing or even stop playing with loss-less WMA files. Strange it is that each 1st song in the album in lossless WMA format will not play while the less in the album will. So the solution is to start with the 2nd song in the album and rewind back to the 1st one and A3 will play. Another experience with WMA is the sound seems to be poorer than the other format. Some might argue that WMA format is not from the beginning the format suits for hi-fi, but at least the same songs sound good to me on Creative Zen Vision, but not on A3. As well as those sound improving features seem not to work but worsen the sound of WMAs. The features work fine and really well with any other formats.
Video quality is arguable the best available from a PMP.
Cowon manages to make A3 plays almost video format in the world, and I have to admit it does. It fells just only the claim to play HD media. As it does not mentioned clearly in the spec-sheet or in its advertisement, buyer can think it plays perfectly HD media. But indeed it plays on low-profile HD.264 with maximum resolution lower than 720p, and anyhow it can not plays 720p low-profile HD.264 smoothly. It pauses time to time with frame-rate below 5fps. Anyway this is still the best PMP that try to play just every format and most of them with success. If you like download video files from internet which normally comes with 100 various type of compression to help internet download time, you will sure love A3. Just throw them to A3 and it will plays 98% of them without problem accept for HD.264 format. It is fair to credit Cowon on firmware continuously improves the A3 playability, but it is still not match the phase it claims in the advertisement. Worth another mention is the talent to play subtitle, it gives even function to set which color of the subtitle it shows.
So I use it everyday, …
I take the A3 with me most of the time I go out. It is huge and not comfortable to leave in any pocket of my suite. Battery-life is not a big concern for me, as I have anyway about 2 hours of time to listen to it during the day. So it let me every 3 days to recharge it. A3 plays well office documents, word, powerpoint or pdf. I’ve just moved to Munich and still can not remember the route of subway. I put a complete timetable, route plan, etc in A3 and can easily look at them when I need. The usability, comfort and so on maybe less than iPod or anything, but whenever you demand the best quality of sound or flexibility to read ton of formats you will depend on A3 for sure. I also photograph seriously and use some decent DSLRs that require 13MB of space to store each pictures. A3 comes to be my lovely assistance as it connect directly to my Canon DSLR and load pictures from my CF. A3 plays anything from jpg to Canon own RAW (.CR2) format without any delay. Anyhow I found that it fells to connect with my Canon 5D while the others are fine. I don’t know why, but it just does not work.
Last thought,…
I like this A3. I admire and adore its capabilities. It proves itself to be one of my most useful tool I have to have everyday in my pocket. If you consider buying a PMP with those extra features (USB host, document support) etc, I think PMP is worth for you. It comes with high price tag but … if you use all the features just like me, you will not find anything better than A3.
Feedback and discuss is totally opened and thanks for all head-fier
