Cowon D2+

Print | Close this window

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0,39029995,49301494,00.htm

Reviewed 17 March 2009

Reviewed by Donald Bell

Released in 2007, Cowon's original iAudio D2 MP3 player quickly earned a reputation for outstanding sound quality, a long-lasting battery and cutting-edge touchscreen technology. Two years later, the Cowon D2+ refines the audio quality and touchscreen interface that made the original model so compelling.

The D2+ will be available soon, costing around £140 for the 8GB version and £170 for the 16GB version.

Design
Physically, the D2+ is nearly indistinguishable from its predecessor, measuring the same 76mm by 56mm by 17mm. The D2+ is manipulated mostly through its touchscreen interface, but controls for power, menu, button hold and volume remain on the top edge of the player. Audio, USB and peripheral connections are located on the left side of the D2+, and an SD/MMC/SDHC card slot is tucked away on the bottom.

The screen on the D2+ is a 64mm (2.5-inch) TFT LCD capable of displaying 1.6 million colours at a 320x240-pixel QVGA resolution. It's similar to the screen of the iPod classic in terms of both size and image quality.

The look and feel of the D2's graphic touchscreen interface has been overhauled for a cleaner, more modern look. Functionally, however, the interface of the D2+ is identical to that of the original D2, which means that scrolling through long lists of music takes patience, and some operations are better executed with a stylus than a clumsy finger.

One of the only hardware design tweaks that distinguishes the D2+ from the model we saw in 2007 is the absence of a metal trim along the front and back of the player. Instead, the D2+ uses an all-plastic design that, though lighter, feels slightly less substantial than the original.

Features
The Cowon D2+ is no slouch when it comes to features, offering music, video and photo playback, along with an FM radio, voice/radio recorder, text reader and Flash player, as well as a tonne of little extras. If you're willing to shell out extra on cables, you can also enable features such as line-input recording and video output.

The D2+ offers a larger screen and more features than the iPod nano, but it's nearly three times as thick and can't pull off tricks like Genius playlists, Cover Flow and tilt control

In spite of the extensive spec sheet, generous screen size and two years spent back on Cowon's drawing board, the best feature of the D2+ is the same feature we loved on the original D2: outstanding audio playback. In fact, one of the only concrete advantages that the D2+ offers over its predecessor is the inclusion of the latest BBE+ suite of audio-enhancement settings.

Beyond sound quality, the D2+ does a good job of handling music playback generally. The main music-playback screen shows off album artwork, track information, elapsed time, and settings such as repeat, shuffle and EQ. An easily accessible pop-up menu in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen lets you jump into the song browser, bookmark playback or add songs to a dynamic playlist.

Common music files such as MP3, WMA (including subscription tracks), Audible and WAV are all supported on the D2+, as well as boutique formats like FLAC and OGG. Support for AAC music files isn't offered, though. That was excusable when the original D2 came out in 2007, but it's harder to justify now that the popular iTunes AAC format can be played on devices beyond the iPod. The latest MP3 players from Sony and Samsung are all compatible with the AAC format.

Another music feature we aren't thrilled about on the D2+ is the song browser, which is awkward to move through. Scrolling is helped by the ability to use the volume buttons on the top of the D2+ to move through lists, but the end result can't match the swiftness of Apple's scroll wheel. That said, we appreciate that the D2+ lets you browse your music by either ID3 tag or your own custom folder view, offering a degree of freedom not found in the iPod universe.

Video playback on the D2+ is unchanged from the days of the original D2, which seems like a lost opportunity on Cowon's part. To be fair, the D2's video features were far ahead of the curve in 2007, and the 64mm screen still trumps the iPod nano's relatively small 51mm (2-inch) screen.

The problem with video on the D2+ is that the supported formats -- AVI and WMV sized at 320x240 pixels -- aren't as common on the Web as the H.264/MPEG files that are standard for most video podcasts and work natively on the iPod. More often than not, you'll need to convert video to play on the D2+ (conversion software is included), which feels like a tedious extra step just to watch video on a 64mm screen. If Cowon had included H.264 video support and some extra wiggle room on the 320x240-pixel resolution, the D2+ would be a more compelling product.

Features such as FM radio, photos, text and voice recording work well, but also remain unaltered from the original D2. Extra utilities, such as a calculator, notepad and a Flash game player, came to the first-generation D2 by way of a firmware update, and are offered on the D2+ out of the box.

Last, but not least, one of the more understated features of the D2+ is a memory-expansion slot that supports SD, MMC and SDHC cards. Instead of treating memory-card content separately from the files stored on the internal memory, the D2+ merges all the content together for a seamless experience. Most people prefer to have content merged this way, but only a few MP3 players pull this trick off -- most notably, the SanDisk Sansa line.

Performance
When you boil it all down, the outstanding feature on the Cowon D2+ is its sound quality. You'll need to upgrade Cowon's bundled earbuds and switch on a few of the player's sound-enhancement settings to really appreciate the sonic supremacy of the D2+, but the effort is well worth it for anyone looking to take their listening experience to another level.

Settings for five-band EQ, Mach3Bass, BBE enhancement, 3D surround, stereo enhancement and MP3 enhancement can all be adjusted independently and saved as a single group preset. You can even drill down into the EQ and adjust the frequency ranges for each of the five bands, if you're feeling very particular.

The interface of the D2+ looks more modern than that of the D2, but functionally it's the same

If you're the kind of audio purist who wouldn't be caught dead slathering artificial audio enhancements on your music, then the D2+ isn't a great pick. In fact, when we switched off all of the EQ and enhancement settings and put on our trusty Shure SE310 earphones, we preferred the sound of the fourth-generation iPod nano and Samsung YP-P2 to that of the D2+, finding they offered a warmer and wider default sound. After juicing a few settings, the sound of the D2+ quickly takes the upper hand, but not everyone enjoys fiddling with EQ to dial in the best performance.

Video quality on the D2+ is bright and crisp, and supports playback up to a smooth 30 frames per second. Unfortunately, if you're converting your videos to get them on the D2+, you will inherently encounter some loss in video quality. Just like the original D2, the video player on the D2+ supports video bookmarking and auto resume, and lets you apply audio-enhancement settings to video audio, as well.

Cowon rates the battery life of the D2+ at 52 hours for audio and 10 hours for video, under best conditions. The original D2 tested out at 50 hours of audio and 10 hours of video playback.

Conclusion
Overall, the Cowon D2+ is a great portable media player, with impressive sound and a long battery life. Still, we're slightly disappointed that Cowon didn't do more with the D2+, considering they had two years to hash out a redesign after launching the original model. For better or worse, the D2+ is practically the same as the D2 we saw in 2007 and will probably prove something of an anticlimax for Cowon fans.

Additional editing by Charles Kloet