Customer Reviews
The Best Videophile PMP 
2008-02-22
If you are interested in videos that look stunning, with excellent contrast, vibrant colors and crisp detail, you must consider this player. If you are also interested in audiophile sound, whether to accompany your videos or for your varied music collection, you must consider this player. Moreover, the A3 provides you with more video and audio formats than any other player I've auditioned, therefore saving you from having to re-rip or convert your audio or video collection. (I should mention that the A3 has a very useful feature: pan and scan. This allows you to fit your videos to the size of the A3 screen without changing the aspect ratio. Changing the aspect ratio can sometimes stretch or compress a scene, which results in video deformity, an unacceptable visual experience.) I have compared the A3 against other fine players, but touchscreen players produce inherently grainy pictures and simply cannot compare with the A3, which is a non-touch screen player.
The A3 is not without defects or shortcomings. It has no wifi, it cannot copy or play DRM-restricted music or videos, it will not sort music by file tags, it has a quirky toggle switch that does not always actuate the proper function, its battery life is only average, and it runs warm to hot. (For a time, many A3s contained defective batteries which would often leak and warp the device, rendering it inoperative. My understanding is that Cowon has corrected this problem.)
I, for one, am willing to accept the A3 with these shortcomings, because it excels as an exceptional music and video player. Do yourself a favor and audition the A3; you will be pleasantly surprised.
Good product; lacks customer service 
2008-02-13
Overall, the product is good. The interface is simple; no additional software is required, only a link to the computer. File support is good; the only problems arise with H.264 video, which lacks good support in the player, and GIFs, which do not animate (no PMP I've seen can do this). The player is quick to respond, but it is a little slow when loading lossless audio (i.e. FLAC); the player often cuts off up to a second of audio at the beginning, but can be rewound and played normally.
The one major flaw in the player is a lack of playlist support. Only one playlist is provided with audio, and this has to be entered into the player manually. Don't buy if you need playlists; otherwise, it's a good choice.
However, the customer service department is virtually nonexistent. The only phone number is for the headquarters in S. Korea; all other support is in chat or e-mail, which lacks anybody with skill. Also, if you want to buy the product, don't use JetMall; it preauthorizes charges on your account and then validates your information. If your information isn't what they think it should be, your transaction will fail, but the preauthorized charges won't go away for a week. Their validation system is bugged; my address, which I double-checked, failed to go through the system, and my bank account was locked.
That aside, the product makes up for the lack of customer service in its quality, but it isn't for everyone.
All But Perfection... At Last! 2008-02-06
I'll have to admit, there were a few things said in reviews about this player that made me reluctant to purchase it in the first place:
* The size. Well, it's certainly no larger than a CD player ever was, so I see no issue. If you can manage a CD player, then you can manage this with no problem at all.
* The Toggle Switch. I really wanted this not to be a problem... and it doesn't have to be... it just makes it difficult for player operation to become mindless; you have to be sure you're pushing straight down to select things. Though I'll admit that the context menu eliminates 75% of the need to ever 'press' OK. Other than that, navigation is easy and really user-friendly without being stupid.
Other things reviewers would say about this player were just silly. For example, the lack of tag-based browsing. Listen, I keep my music organized in folders and am quite used to going through 2 or 3 folders just to get to the file I want. So I can't browse by genre on the A3. Why would I want to? Heck, half the music I listen to is always put in the 'Rock' genre anyway. The on-the-fly playlist function more than makes up for this in my opinion.
The other complaint I saw was its lack of DRM-protected file support. If you really need to buy DRM-protected media, then you obviously don't know that there are many MANY ways of acquiring DRM-free files. In other words, this player is a torrent pirate's dream. Not only will it play pretty much every file you can find on the internet, but plays it beautifully without transcoding a single thing!
The Cons:
* VOB (DVD video) files seem to have trouble with multi-chanel audio and subtitles. An anime series I loaded on to the player would only play in japanese and not recognize the subtitle tracks at all... so I was forced to encode it in to a different format. Frustrating, but not a deal breaker (hey, I don't expect it to be able to play EVERYTHING).
* Glitchy photo viewer. When playing a high-bitrate music or video file, don't try to look at pictures. The memory doesn't seem to be able to handle it and just sticks on the hourglass screen. Also, large photos don't seem to like to load consistently; They either take forever and cause skips in the music or simply don't show up at all.... but only sometimes. An issue that a future firmware upgrade will probably address.
Now to my favorite aspects of the A3:
* FLAC! My entire music library is in FLAC, where I can manage, so I'm used to the beauty and intricacy of lossless audio on my computer and now I can FINALLY have it in my portable media player.
* The generous 60 gig HD can hold almost 100 FLAC encoded albums or many hours of high-quality video.
* The display on this thing is mind-blowing; the vividness and clarity are comparable to a high-end laptop screen. Its seriously like holding a photo in your hands.
*The sound! Besides the fact that the many high-quality codecs supported will always trump mp3 for sound quality, the A3 has very few EQ settings (I think 5 or so) and what the EQ presets lack in quantity, they more than make up for in quality. The user-editable EQ is the best I've seen in any audio player
I've owned my A3 for about 12 hours now and I already can't live without it. Now I'm glad my iRiver H10 20 GB MP3 Player/Recorder (Grey) died. I never thought I would even want video function in a PMP, but the A3 made me a believer.
I'm not saying this player is for everyone (I would NEVER buy one for my mother) but if you're a technologically inclined geek with a few hundred bucks and a thirst for high-end entertainment, then you need the A3.
Excellent PMP Player 2008-01-16
Angered with my old iPod, I was on the lookout for a PMP that would actually play the types of media I wanted to play. My brother had a video iPod, and there was just too much work involved with encoding and all of that. Plus, I hated iTunes.
It eventually came down to being between the Archos 605 and the Cowon A3 for me. I went the the A3, and my brother went with the 605, so I've had the experience with both of these.
The A3 is a great PMP. It will play almost anything you can throw at it, and it will play it well. The screen is very crisp (although it is glossy, so there are some reflections sometimes). It shows up as an external hard drive, so you don't need any software to put anything on it, which is great, because it works with Linux, OS X, windows, and anything else out of the box. I have found the video quality to be superb. The picture is top notch for cartoons like futurama and anime. For real video, it is still good, but not perfect.
Video can be stretched depending on the ratio. The A3 will either show it as it's original size, or stretch it to take up the whole screen. It's a nice option since the screen is not exactly 16:9, and no matter what the source is, there would be black bars on some edges.
It does video out right out of the box. I don't personally own an HDTV, but my relatives do. When I went over, we all watched star wars on the HDTV. The quality was good, just like watching a DVD. Sound was alright, but it was good after I turned off the 3d sound. The 3d sound can muffle the vocals, I'm assuming because the vocals are usually center track and the 3d sound probably does something with sounds unique to each channel.
The video player is awesome. I live in a boarding house, with a shared basement that has a kitchen in it. I find myself downstairs watching Futurama while I'm cooking lunch or dinner. It's very nice, and in situations where I would sit around bored, I can actually enjoy some media.
Since it does so many formats, I never have to encode anything, so it's all copy and paste. This makes it very convenient to put media on your A3. If you have a half hour before you have to go somewhere, and you feel like watching something you have saved on your computer, all you have to do is copy paste it. No transcoding or anything like that.
The audio player doesn't support tag browsing, but, to be honest, I don't really miss it. The A3 handles music simply by reading folders. But, it's not as bad as it sounds, because you can add directories and songs to playlists on the go. I've found it gives me a lot more power for picking the songs I want to hear.
Sound quality is top notch. I bought some high end in ear cannal headphones, and when compared to my old PMP, this thing sounds awesome. The 10 band EQ, BBE, and 3d sound really make the music sound nice. It makes it stand out. I've found myself ditching low quality MP3 rips and opting for FLAC and OGG instead. You can tell the difference with the A3 if you have a good pair of headphones, where everything else on my iPod just sounds terrible.
Battery life is not that hot, but I never use a PMP for more than 8 hours anyways, so it's no loss for me. The GUI is weak too, but this PMP is for people who want functionality. If you want a pretty interface and to spend all your time dealing with proprietary garbage and encoding, you know where to look. If you want your media on the road to be of excellent quality, this is for you.
It can also record video, has an FM receiver which it can record from (although it's not that good of sound quality), record from the microphone, and it can record from the line in in either FLAC or WMA.
Overall, I love my A3, and it really is the best portable media player for media. It doesn't have a lot of gimmicks, but it does what it should do, and it does it well.
AWESOME 2008-01-14
This pmp, Cowon A3 is just awesome.
I've meaning to have a new I-pod for a long time.
Before I got this, I have asked around on the internet.
I-pod video can play video files,
but I-pod video has much smaller screen.
I-pod touch might be another option,
but that model has small capacity and many errors bave been reported.
Cowon A3 plays any kinds of media files.
I put A3 on the running machine and watch music video
while I work out.
If you are looking for the coolest pmp, this is my answer.
Stunning PMP 2008-06-09
I have had my eye on the Cowan A2 for quite some time, and when I was ready to purchase it, i saw the A3 was out, wow what an awesome PMP! Great battery life, beautiful picture, excellent sound with lots of enhancements.
I can't say enough about this media player, it is probably the most satisfying purchase I have made in years.
For True Audiophiles. Hands Down the most feature packed & best Sounding player for the $$ 2008-05-31
It even makes poor quality mp3 sounds great when I hook it up to my living room speakers where there's no where for poorly encoded mp3s to hide, unlike on small headphones which have no range in frequency (highs & lows) you know? You can tweak the sound with the many EQ, bass settings and Digital Signal Processing (DSP)fields like Rock, Jazz etc. you'll freak. IT has Line-In Recording which is a huge plus for me.
The picture quality is equally amazing near HD quality. It is not for the faint of heart, only for true audiophiles providing freedom for music lovers. It's even a portable Digital Video recorder as it can record from the TV etc. It's a god send. It plays virtually all types of media files. No proprietary software needed (crappy I tunes). It is a little hefty but it isn't meant to be for those on the run as much. For that purpose, I suggest the little 2 or 4 gigs ones. This puppy I believe is for extended travel perhaps to watch a movie on when you are away and for the jukebox feature of hooking it up to my audio-visual system. It even has a built in alarm clock!!
The company provides firmware upgrades too so the battery life is higher than the reviews.
Very good - yet has flaws. 2008-05-14
Pros: Beautiful HD Screen, reasonable hours of play, GREAT (!!!) format support - just throw it into the device and it'll play. comfortable, light weight even on 60GB version, wide subtitles support, great menu language support. can use it as TiVo. You can connect it to a TV and watch good quality movies. Reading small documents is cool. Supports BBE so your music will sound FANTASTIC!
Cons: For First, and HD support is a lie. it WONT support most x264 files. Some devices has a problem with its volume (too low), some don't, and can't be fixed with firmware. plus COWON are not even aware of this problem so...don't count on your volume to be very high.
The way you search music is just plain stupid, you can only see the filename. you can't sort the files by Band or by Album, so you have to make your own directories for each band, which can be annoying when you have 30GB of singles on your Cowon.
No gapless playback - you gotta listen of The Dark Side Of The Moon with about 3-4 seconds gap between each track.
No Thumbnails view for the pictures, and it will only zoom x4.
No case for the device (cheapest I found is 30$).
No Wi-Fi, but who needs this $h1t on the go, right?
Conclusion: It's a good device, but don't sell your soul to the devil for this. Little advice: since it supports FLAC format don't forget to buy atleast entry level headphones for it - those earbuds suck.
Cowon A3 - If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is... 
2008-02-26
If this player performed as advertised and did everything it was supposed to, it would easily rate five stars. Unfortunately, it has a few MAJOR flaws and several minor ones, which Cowon does not seem to be addressing through firmware improvements. I bought the A3 for the purpose of playing music, so for nearly four hundred dollars that's what I expect it to do perfectly. Unfortunately it falls far short of perfection.
First, the good points: The sound quality is great. I own two other mp3 players - an IRiver, which has extremely poor sound quality, and a Cowon F2 which has good sound quality, but not as good as the A3's. The graphic equalizer works well. The "Jet effect" sound enhancement features are useless if you're using a good pair of headphones. When you turn the volume up loud there's no distortion. (With the F2, too much bass will cause major distortion at medium to high volume.)
60GB seems to be plenty of storage for music. I use high-quality mp3 files (256+ kbps) because I can't hear any difference between that format and the original CD. I put almost 3,000 songs on the A3 and only used up about half the available storage space. (Remember, ALL manufacturers including Cowon lie about hard disk capacity. The A3 actually only has about 54GB of storage.) File transfer is reasonably fast - probably as good as it gets for this type of device. And speaking of transferring files, there are no artificial restrictions. This is no Ipod. Cowon doesn't force their customers to jump through any hoops to use their products. You can change the wallpaper as often as you like, change the startup and shutdown screen, and play your songs as many times as you wish without the manufacturer trying to squeeze more money out of you.
I use the A3 mostly while driving. It can handle normal driving conditions and road bumps fine without skipping.
Although I use the A3 almost exclusively to listen to music it is nice to have other capabilities available. The picture viewer is very good. I uploaded a few photos that were already sized for the A3's screen (800 x 480 pixels) and they looked fine. The zoom feature works very well - the photos still looked sharp when magnified. The display quality is good for LCD, but when I compared a photo on the A3 to the same photo on my computer's CRT display the A3 appeared washed out and flat. However, the A3's display is perfectly acceptable for its primary function of navigating menu items. In fact, it's very impressive.
The joystick works fine for me. I have large hands and have very little trouble manipulating it.
Cowon's on-line technical support is pretty good. The technicians seem to be reasonably competent and they do try to help. However, they aren't interested in documenting the A3's many bugs and passing the information on to Cowon's programmers and technicians.
It's great to have .flac support.
Now for the bad points: There are three huge flaws in the A3. First, there's often a loud pop between songs. I verified the pops weren't actually part of the mp3 files. I contacted Cowon about the pops and they didn't have an answer.
The second major flaw is that there's always a pause between songs. That might be a nice feature when listening to random songs, but it's very annoying when listening to a CD in which the tracks are supposed to blend together. Also, the pause isn't silent - there are always two or three small pops between each song (different from the loud pops mentioned above). There's no way to disable the pause. I guess the only way around it would be to encode albums in one large file instead of separate tracks. I really don't want to spend a few days re-encoding dozens of CDs.
The third major flaw is poor video playback. The A3 supports lots of file formats, but after spending many hours trying to figure out what the A3 will play correctly and what it won't, I've pretty much given up on watching high-quality videos. The A3 is able to play SOME low-quality files without any problems. I spent several hours trying to get my three favorite DVD-quality music videos (which play perfectly on the computer) to play on the A3 without success.
The A3 also has problems with some music file formats. I have a few .ape files, which the A3 would not play at all. The .ape files caused an error message stating "Compression is too high." I re-encoded the songs at a lower compression setting. The A3 then played them, but skipped every few seconds. No .mp3's by "Queensrÿche" will play. The "ÿ" causes problems for the A3.
Some other problems are also present. It's very difficult to locate a file in a large list. For example, I have one folder that contains about 2,000 songs. Locating a specific song is very time consuming and frustrating because of the way the scroll bar works.
Adjusting the "Jet Effect" settings (equalization, BBE, etc.) while music is playing can cause the A3 to suddenly turn itself off.
The A3 doesn't use the same type of USB plug as other Cowon devices. Since I use a Cowon F2 frequently as well, it would be nice to be able to connect both of them using the same cable so I wouldn't have to switch cables all the time.
Connecting the A3 to the computer can be tricky. The instructions indicate you should use the USB ports on the back of your computer. I found this to be true. Connecting the A3 to the USB port on the front of my computer did not work, and caused problems with an external USB drive connected to the back port.
The quality of construction is average. The only noticeable flaw is that the unit does not sit flat. It will rock back and forth slightly when placed on a flat surface.
In my opinion the firmware is beta quality. Hopefully Cowon will get their act together soon. The fact that a nearly $400 device generates all the skips, pops, and pauses that it does is almost unbelievable. But it's still better than an Ipod or any Microsoft product. I can't imagine what life would be like if all the appliances in my home were as poorly programmed as this device.
Here's a helpful tip: The A3 scales album cover images to 180 x 180 pixels. If you assign the top left corner of the A3's screen the x, y coordinates 0, 0, the album cover images fill the area from 81, 99 to 260, 278. I pre-scaled all my album cover images to 176 x 176, then added a one-pixel-wide white border around the outside, then a one-pixel-wide black border. That looks very sharp. (I'll post a sample as a customer image.)
Another helpful tip: You can create your own startup and shutdown screen image to replace the Cowon logo. This isn't documented in the instructions. Here's how: Make an 800 x 480 picture. Convert it to an 8-bit 256-color .bmp file (I used IrfanView - load your picture, select "Image," "Decrease Color Depth," "256 Colors." Make sure the "Use Floyd-Steinberg dithering" box is checked. Click "Ok." Save the picture as a .bmp file.) Rename your file "A3_LOGO" with no extension. The size of this file should be 377KB. Then, follow the steps to upgrade the firmware with this exception: Replace the "A3_LOGO" file in the firmware archive with your "A3_LOGO" file before completing the firmware upgrade. You can also delete the "\Photo\Logo" directory on the A3 since the image will be stored in memory from now on.
Follow up: I did some file format comparisons and found more problems. There are so many bugs in the A3 that hoping a firmware upgrade will fix things is like hoping the next version of Microsoft Windows won't have any bugs. The reality is that Cowon is concentrating on adding more features instead of fixing the ones that are already there.
After using this device daily for a couple months and trying lots of things with it, I'm convinced that a lot of the A3's problems are a result of a slow microprocessor. That would explain the sluggish response time, the inability to play .ape files (which take more processor time to decode than .mp3 or .flac), and the inability to play high-quality videos. No firmware upgrade will ever overcome slow processor speed.
In spite of the A3's many flaws, I still think it's the best of its type even if it will never be perfect, and I don't regret purchasing it.
Cowon A3 Customer Review 2008-02-25
Audio and video playing are very good. Will play .avi no problem. Audio sound enhancement is also very good. User interface needs improvement. Battery lasts about 4 hours for video and 6-7 hours for audio. The hard drive will cause skipping with harsh movements, i.e., anything other than walking. Softwares that can be used with player are not all included. Full softwares require additional fee. The player does heat up if put inside a pocket. Too bad there aren't any exposable carrying case with backpack straps for secure carrying and heat dissipation. However, if video and audio quality is your primary purpose, I don't think there is anything better on the market. If this player drops its price to $250, I can't see anyone buying anything else in the same category.
