COWON S9 3.3" 32GB MP3 / MP4 Player

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Default user interface isn't as polished, but some of the UCI's posted on various forums are of extremely high quality. Sound quality is fantastic; my FLAC music and my Westone UM1's sound awesome. I can only imagine how they'd sound with even higher quality headphones.

Comment:
I was looking for something to replace my Ipod as I was getting fustrated with Itunes, and for the mean time went back to my about 5 year old flash based rca lyra, I started reading reviews on the cowon s9 and finally decided to purchase one from NCIX, and am glad I did I would deffinatly buy it again and would recomend this mp3 player to anyone, In my opinion it is a good contender for the Ipod killer.Sound quality is amazing and there is a noticeable difference from the Ipod. I am only using $30 skull candy ear buds so a more expensive pair I am sure will improve sound quality even more. All the equalizer presets are great also.The interface was a bit of getting used to for me as I have never owned an touch screen mp3 player, but the buttons on the top of the player for valume, play/pause, and next/previouse song are great, I like that I can still do these things without removing the player from my jacket pocket.If your mp3s are not tagged you will have to find your music through the folder view as apposed to selecting an album cover because if the mp3 does not have it you will have a herd time selecting music, I was originally fustrated with this but now that I have discovered the folder view things are much easier.I have watched a couple of movies and videos on it and they work great the oled screen is very nice.

Comment:
Sound quality is AMAZING and the screen is really pretty. The screen is also very durable (Google Youtube pocket-knife slashing tests).Too bad mine died in 4 weeks though. Guess I got a defective one. I wouldn't blame NCIX for that though not their fault.

Comment:
I've owned a Cowon player before, the X5, which was excellent with long battery life and decent sound quality. When it died I went looking for a new MP3 player. iPods were out of the question because I did not want to be lumbered with iTunes (which I hate) and most of the other flash based players were only 2-8GB. HDD players seem to be few these days.Ultimately I read reviews of the S9 and having already enjoyed a Cowon player opted to get this one. To be honest, I would have preferred to have replaced the X5 if I could have sourced one!Anyhow I digress; I ordered and now have the 32GB S9 and it is absolutely great! I love it. It is feather light, really you hardly notice the weight, yet it feels strong with the most glorious screen I have ever seen on a portable. I watched the i.am OLED advert movie included and it was a joy. I have since converted some MPEG2 video and that was amazing to see on the screen, very fluid with excellent colour reproduction.In keeping with other Cowon products, the sound quality is outstanding, but you do need to play with the settings to get the most out of it. The included earphones are OK but you'll likely want to invest in something higher end to get the best out of it. The S9s audio features include 5 band equaliser, BBE sound enhancements, stereo widening and MP3 enhance that attempts to restore some of the detail lost in MP3 recordings - which seems to work pretty well (but then almost all my MP3s are 320kbps). The S9 will play OGG, FLAC, MP3, WMA, WAV and APE audio files and Xvid, WMV, DivX video files.The interface takes a little getting used to and some options / navigation aren't terribly intuitive. The "flip" to get more options can be a bit annoying at first as some of the icons make little sense but I've seen far worse. The UI is customisable as it's Flash based and it can cope with Flash apps (up to Flash 7).Now the bad news: there is no support for AAC audio files which means any iTunes+ tracks you may have will need converting to MP3. For video, there is no support for MPEG4 - except Xvid and DivX(3-5). Nero Recode encoded files won't play (even with an MP3 soundtrack) so getting video on to it can be awkward. The software from iAudio is not great but it does include a video converter that has specific profiles for the S9.Finally there is no wi-fi and that is a shame as it would be a great addition. However I did want an audio player first and foremost - not a PDA. There is bluetooth and bluetooth stereo headsets are supported. A few other interesting things are being able to bookmark specific sections of video per file, recording the radio (only to WMA though) and taking snapshots from video files.All in, I am so far very impressed with the S9. I have yet to see if it really can play video for 11 hours or audio for 55 - if it's anything like the X5 it should get very close to both (my X5 hit 35 hours audio playback!).