[castleofargh]

I agree with that for cowon. if you are anti EQ anti DSP then cowon has little interest.
 
also I usually want to kill myself when using cowon's UI. it's kind of an extreme statement because they happen to have implemented a lot of little differences from model to model, but I have always hated the UI's overall. on some you could change a lot of things making the interface a lot better so again I don't want to make them look too bad, but overall cowon is not the king of UIs for me.
 
I had a S9, played with a j3 and now I still have the I10, it sounds nice, has I think about 3ohm impedance, very very low hiss level(much lower than any sony), and of course when you know your DSPs a little you can really go a long way into making your own sound. EQ is very cool with pretty precise settings, I never had any real problem compensating for a phone on it.
so again compared to even the A15, in a lot of domains I would be tempted to say the cheap I10 is better, or at least more versatile(but no line out). that's my objective opinion.
 
 now comes reality, I never use it, I probably have spent more time with the A15 in a month than with the cowon in last year. all because the UI makes me unhappy.

 

[goody]

  Can anyone who have the japanese version of this player confirm about language selector option?
I really like the blue color from A16 and maybe gonna buy it in near future if possible.

I have a blue one ordered from japan it should be with me by the end of this week....i will let you know

 

[TripBitShooter]

Look... I'm a huge Cowon fan, this statement coming from someone who has been into portable audio rigs for years. I also like the Sansa Clip range and think overall they are probably the best budget DAP ever.
But from my experience on these forums, whether yer going to be happy with Cowon or not, is going to come down as to how you listen to your music.
It seems to me that you get 3 kind of listeners;

1) The guy that listens to DAPs with no DSPs (Digital Signal Processing ie sound enhancements + EQ)
2) The guy that enjoys a very subtle tinkering with the devices DSPs
3) The guy that likes to go to town and really mess around with a devices DSPs to see what kind of new sound signatures he can come up with.

If yer guy number 1. then the Cowon might not be yer best choice, in fact sufficiently good audio quality will be hard to distinguish between a Sansa Clip (costing $30), a Cowon (costing $150), a Sony (costing $250) and a flagship smartphone (costing $600+). I am pretty confident that if I volume matched a track, used the same headphones and blindfolded you, you wouldn't be able to tell which is which (when all the devices are set to Flat/Normal eq and no special sound enhancers applied.

If yer guy number 2 or 3 then a Cowon maybe attractive as I think it's arguable that Cowon has the widest array of DSPs on any DAP. The multitude of different sound signatures available on a COwon is huge.
There are a couple of other reasons I have continually gone back to Cowon which i explain in this video here.


But Cowon arn't perfect, they often have a tricky UI to learn and then a lot of the devices lack some features I would like such as no file limits and bluetooth etc.

Yep I'm guy number 1 :/. I only ever use EQ if the headphones I'm testing for review are really bad and and I want to see how good they are on a flat sound signature

 

[ClieOS]

  Does the Fiio L5 cable provide a line output that by-passes the A15 Amp and direct to the source?

 
Yes.

 

[castleofargh]

Yep I'm guy number 1 :/. I only ever use EQ if the headphones I'm testing for review are really bad and and I want to see how good they are on a flat sound signature

EQ and DSPs are the spice of music. when good and moderately applied they improve almost everything. when they are of bad quality and you let clueless people do the cooking, you end up with an horrible mess. ^_^
 
I never had one headphone that had the exact signature I wanted. however close they are, I usually end up using a little EQ or some low level mod. but only when even a dumb monkey could do it because I have 2 left hands, so easy stuff like changing the filters on an ER4 or a mc5.

 

 

[BruceBanner]

Yep I'm guy number 1 :/. I only ever use EQ if the headphones I'm testing for review are really bad and and I want to see how good they are on a flat sound signature

 
And i always find this aspect interesting among the audio community. I let my ears be the judge of whether something sounds good or not (as I am sure you do also). If i flip through the various DSP presets and find myself liking them more than Flat/Normal then that is what I will choose to use. After some time spent sitting down and tinkering I find an even sweeter sound spot using my own EQ settings and various DSPs switched on/off and set at different values etc. I use the same settings on pretty much every IEM I own (ranging from $30-$350), again it just sounds better to my ears. From my perspective, to own a device that has a wide array of DSP and not use them is missing out on obtaining better sound quality, plain and simple. But i also know that's not true, because I have passed on my DSP settings to other 'flat' users and they scream in horror! When i toggle back and forth I find Flat is dull, analytical and lifeless, to them the experience is different.
It is interesting...

 

[Raketen]

 When i toggle back and forth I find Flat is dull, analytical and lifeless, to them the experience is different.

I've always found my ears quickly adapt to different settings, so if I listen with dsp or eq'd, if it's not overexaggerated it starts to sound 'normal' to me- and then I switch back to flat and it sounds weird. So I generally just leave it flat. This also applies to gear and whatnot - I really have to listen closely and switch between stuff frequently to notice anything that isnt super-obvious. Suspect i'd make a terrible sound engineer :\ That said, I like having the option available in Rockbox and on the a17, if only to toy around with or compensate for really out of whack recordings (trying to make poorly recorded podcasts, mixes, live recordings a bit more legible).

 

[TripBitShooter]

I normally like it flat, also for another reason that I sometimes don't remember to turn it off, leaving my personal cans sounding weird. I also like to comment on how good a particular headphone would be if it was a flat sound signature, such as the MDR-ZX750AP which was so bloated and bass heavy. I brought down the bass and brought up the mids, and I got a surprisingly clear and accurate sound signature with plenty of detail for its price.

 

[ClieOS]

As promised.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Pretty high quality piece of kit.

 

[mettacitta]

  even with 192gb storage capability,the long battery life,great ui,small size and low end frequencies no ipod or clip could ever hope to deliver?
 
i mean yes three hundred dollars sounds steep but i can't think of another player that comes close to having everything the A17 has, and on top of that,in my personal experience every single sony audio player i have purchased since the 1990s still works today.that speaks volumes to me for monetary worth
 
i.e. the nwz-e345 i purchased 5 years back cost $79 for 16gb and even after nearly four years solid use (i stopped using it so much when i got my F807) my e345 still works perfectly today, and it can playback 12 hours of music on a full charge,so here we are just a couple months shy of 5 years after i purchased it  that's roughly $16 a year in that sense
 
and now there is the A17 a 300 dollar player that natively holds four times as much as the e345 model (if i round it out to $80 for what i paid five years ago for the  16gb e-345 then  i was paying roughly $5 per gig of storage,so 64gb (or purchasing four of those players) would have cost me $320, so not only is the price of the A17 less expensive,but the player is far better in every way,and it can store another 128gb via microSD) so to me the price while not cheap,is well justified.

 
Totally agree.
 
I haven't stopped using this player since day one

 

[georgelai57]

@ClieOS - can you provide a link for this? Thanks

 

[imackler]

Yes.

Have you tried it ClieOS? As only a source, how does it match up w other daps as source? Thanks!

 

[ClieOS]

@ClieOS - can you provide a link for this? Thanks

 
To the Sony product page or where I ordered it? Well I got mine from Amazon Japan using Tenso.com forwarding service to my country. You can however find it on eBay, just search 'CKS-NWA10'. It is about $55 ir so, not exactly cheap.
 

Have you tried it ClieOS? As only a source, how does it match up w other daps as source? Thanks!

 
As only a source? As in using the line-out? Well, my LOD is still somewhere in China waiting to be shipped, probably won't get it  for at least another week.
 
If you are asking as a standalone player however, here is my impression.

 

[georgelai57]

@ClieOS - you are right. That's not cheap. When my A15 comes, I shall go alfresco. The ZX-1 leather cover I bought at a Sony Store here in Singapore was only US$38.

 

[Dalek]

Any fresh and reliable news about the A17 availability in Europe? it seems we're all stuck to the 16GB model...