RRP: 2GB £30 4GB £38
Advanced MP3 Players sent me a Cowon iAudio E2 MP3 Player (2GB) to test.
The first thing I noticed about the player was its size. It’s about the size of the old iPod Shuffle so you will have no problems fitting it in your pocket. It comes with a little ring on top so you can put it on a keychain or on a neck lanyard (I genuinely have about 20 lanyards I never use, why do they come with everything? I once got one with a tube of toothpaste…Anyway, I digress)
I thought I would jump right in and transfer some music over to the device. A feature I have seen in a few MP3 Players recently is that they don’t have a dedicated transfer port. The Cowon’s headphone jack doubles as a USB port which is a nice space saving feature. It also leaves fewer holes for dirt to get into.
After transferring about 200mb of songs I decided to have a play with it. I’m fairly anal when it comes to sound quality and the Cowon certainly didn’t disappoint me. The quality was superior to many of the MP3 players I have used and the built in BBE really made a difference. For those that don’t know, Cowon describe their BBE as:
“BBE MP (Minimized Polynomial Non-Linear Saturation) Process improves digitally compressed sound, such as MP3, by restoring and enhancing the harmonics lost through compression. BBE MP works by re-generating harmonics from the source material, effectively recovering warmth, details and nuance.”
To be honest that’s a bit of a mouthful but actually whatever they are doing to the music defiantly does make a difference to the sound quality.
The unit itself has several buttons: Shuffle/BBE Button, Volume Up/Down, Power, Next/Previous Track and a reset button on the bottom (which I haven’t had to use!)
Honestly it’s quite a nice little MP3 player. They really have thought of everything when designing this. It supports MP3, WMA, FLA and WAV formats which is actually one or two more than the norm. You can keep on listening for 11 hours and 30 minutes before you have to recharge it.
