Are you in the market for an audiophile-quality mp3 player? If you are, look no further than the Cowon iAudio 7. It delivers top-notch audio quality with support for FLAC and Ogg. And with 5 band EQ and BBE sound enhancement, it can even breathe new life into your old boring 128k mp3 files.

With battery life of up to 60 hours, you can enjoy your music for days and even weeks without recharging. Bring this player along on your next business trip and leave the charger at home.

The article has been updated with the battery test.

Introduction

The iAudio 7 continues a long line of Cowon's iAudio series of media players. And this is the best one yet. If you are familiar with the iAudio line, you might know that the previous version of the player was the first player equipped with a .85” 4gb hard drive. However, with the iAudio 7, the hard drive is now replaced with flash memory. This eliminates one of the main complaints users had with the iAudio 6, which was the slow load time. The media now plays instantly thanks to the flash memory.

Initial impression

The first thing I noticed when opened the box was that the player looked almost exactly the same as the iAudio 6. Since I didn't have its predecessor in-house to do a side-by-side comparison, I would have to say the two look very much like each other. It was only that the the previous version had the big “COWON” name labeled across the top of the player.

The tiny player looks like more like a tic-tac container than a media player. The player packs a 1.3” 160x128, 26K TFT LCD. This is rather a surprised move since its predecessor used an OLED screen, which consumes less energy. Like the iAudio 6, the current incarnation of the player features the patented swing-touch system. The said touch system presents itself as a touch-sensitive groups of buttons with a diagonal band for your finger to glide back and forth on with a play/pause button and a record/back button. There are dedicated buttons on top for power/hold, menu, and volume controls. On the top you'd find the earphone jack and a line-in jack whereas the bottom is for the USB 2.0 connector.

User Interface

The main menu of the player consists of icons lined up diagonally with each representing a unique function. With the swing-touch system, you use your finger to glide through the diagonal bar to cycle through each function. You then use the play/pause button to select or use the record/back button to go back up a menu level.

The swing-touch system is rather intuitive. It worked nicely on the iAudio 6 and still performs well on the iAudio 7. My only complaint is that it can be too sensitive. On many occasions, I mistakenly made a selection without even touching the surface. You can adjust the touch sensitivity via the settings menu. I prefer the senstivity set to "low."

Features

If you are looking for features in a small package, the iAudio 7 would not disappoint. It comes in 2 variation: 4gb (silver) and 8gb (red). Like many of the players in its class, “tiny” supports the usual popular audio formats like MP3, WMA, ASF. However, it goes one better than other players with the support for FLAC, WAV and OGG audio formats. Many sites reported that the player supports AAC. However, I have confirmed with Cowon that none of their products supports the format.

On the video front, there is support for MPEG4 and XviD. Of course, to the iAudio fans, this is nothing new. The iAudio 6 supports all the mentioned codecs a year ago. But it's just good to know that now all the files in these various formats can now play instantly now that the player uses flash memory.

Performance

Let's start with the “meat” then I'll cover the “gravy” later. The “meat” for this media player is audiophile-quality audio. Period. The video playback, FM radio, line-in recording are considered “gravy”; they're just nice to have.

Audio playback

The sound quality of the player remains top notch. I would even go out on a limb and say that it sounds way better than my iPod; and I'm a BIG iPod fan. The 5 band equalizer gives the user the freedom to fine tune the music experience. There are 6 audio presets: Normal, Rock, Pop, Jazz, classic, Vocal and User. Adding to that is the BBE sound enhancement, which enhances the audio quality without making it sound unnatural. This means that the player can make your run-of-the-mill 128k mp3 sound CD-quality. Other sound enhancements include Mach3Bass, MP Enhance, and 3D surround support. Again, nothing new here, the iAudio 6 has all these too.

My music collection consists largely of files in the Apple Lossless format. I'm not a big fan of lossy formats like mp3 though I do have some of them in my collection. To test the FLAC feature, I converted many of the Apple-Lossless files to FLAC and loaded them up to the player. Only one word could describe listening to FLAC-encoded songs on the player: heavenly. I was not able to detect any difference between playing WAV files and FLAC. Same quality, less space? Please, sir, may I have some more?

For those of you who prefer the Ogg format, the player supports up to q10 on the Ogg chart, which is 500kb/s. However, if you want to save space it doesn't make sense to use q10 compression anyway. I'd only go up to q6. Using my Shure e2c earphones, I detected very little difference between q6-compressed files and FLAC.

For those who prefer quantity over quality, the iAudio 7 is still the best audio player you. The 5 band EQ combined with the BBE feature is all you need to breathe new life into your boring 128k mp3 files. I have a very few 128k mp3 files (usually what's left from my napster/morpehus/kazaa days). But whatever mp3 files I threw at “tiny”, it just kept on churning top-audio output at me. Impressive is such an understatement for what this player could do. “Mind-blowing” is more like it.

Two more audio-related features before moving on to others. The player displays album art when one is available. Lastly, it can also display lyrics embedded in the audio file.

Video playback

Though the player can play video files, I am not impressed with the quality of the output on the 1.3” screen. And this is hardly the player's fault. It just that watching videos playing at 15fps on a screen this tiny is impossible to give the user a full theater experience. OK, maybe when the player supports Dolby Digital AC-3 or Dolby TrueHD, I might have to eat my words. But for now, I'm not impressed.

Given what I just mentioned, video support is a nice feature to add to the list of what this player could do. The quality of the video even with the XviD compressions is just not on par with other players like the video iPod or the Zen Vision:M. If you want a media player with an impressive video playback in a tiny package, I'd recommend the iriver Clix 2 , which sports a gorgeous 2.2” OLED screen and plays videos at a smooth 30 fps.

Audio recording

The iAudio 7 can record audio from multiple sources: line-in, built-in mic and FM radio. But whatever the source, the only format available is WMA. You can adjust the quality of the recording from 64kbps to 128kbps. Also, the quality can be adjusted independently per audio source.

I am disappointed that the recording quality can only go up to 128kpbs. This means that it's probably not the top choice for transferring music from your 45s to digital format. But I can also understand that there could be a lot of abuse from allowing higher-bit-rate recording; think live concerts.

The built-in microphone is perfect for recording lectures or interviews. It is very sensitive but this can be adjusted. Reporters take note, ditch your digital voice recorder and pick up one of these instead.

Other features

Besides the mentioned features, the iAudio 7 also packs the following features: FM radio, photo viewer, and text viewer. These features are what I refer to as “gravy”. They're nice to have but they're not the player's strong points. Basically, you shouldn't be buying it because of these features.

FM radio performance was on par with other players I live in Orange County, CA and usually get pretty decent FM reception. However, this player was not able to pick up many of the local stations around the area. The sound quality is decent. If you like to record from radio, the 96kbps setting is all you need.

Text viewer can display text files in ASCII format. If you text files are in English, there should be no problem displaying them here. However, if you have a text file in a different language, you have to switch the player's display language first, in order to view the file properly. Otherwise, gibberish is all you are going to get.

Like many other modern media players, the iAudio 7 can display photos. Like the iAudio 6, it displays thumbnails in 3 rows of 3. The thumbnails are tiny and the cursor is not very visible. So selecting which picture you want to view might be quite a challenge.

Along with the photo viewer, the player can also act as a USB host. This means that you can transfer photos directly from your camera to the player without the need for a computer. With up to 8gb of storage, you no longer need to bring your computer along to offload pictures from your camera on your next vacation.

Podcast Ready

The iAudio 7 is podcast ready -certified. This means that you can run myPodder "podcatching" software stored on the player from any computer it's attached to. The application then downloads the updated podcast episodes. Once done, you can unplug the player and enjoy your podcast episodes all without installing software on any computer.

Battery life

I was not able to get a accurate measurement on the battery life. I know this is the main feature of the iAudio 7. According to the manufacturer, the battery life should be close to 60 hours. The battery was on full charge when I received it about a week ago, and it is still going strong. I used it casually to play all kinds of media usually about an hour at a time. My iPods would usually give up a few days back.

I will update this review with a more accurate measurement of the battery life performance.

Update: After two days of testing, I was able to get only about 40 hours of play time out of the player. In my test, I loaded the player up with 650 mp3 files with various bit rates. I used the default EQ settings and the LCD was turned off.

Update 2:  James from Cowon has informed me that the battery tests performed on the iAudio 7 were done with the following conditions:

Audio Test Conditions:

• backlight off, default volume, normal EQ, BBE, M3B, MPE off.
• MPEG1, layer3, 128kbps, iAUDIO Song.mp3 remake.
  

Video Test Conditions:

• backlight brightness 5, default volume, normal EQ, BBE, M3B, MPE off.
• MPEG4, 512kbps, 30fps, MP3 audio.

Conclusion

Feature-wise, the iAudio 7 is almost identical to the previous version. The only two differences are the flash memory replacement and the 60 hours of battery life. So does this mean you shouldn't consider buying the iAudio 7? Not at all. You should! The player is what the iAudio 6 should have been in the first place.

If you are looking for an audiophile-quality audio player in a small package, stop looking and just get the iAudio 7. There is no reason to look anywhere else. You cannot find a better sounding player in a package smaller than this.

Pros

• big sound in a small package
• top notch audio quality with support for FLAC, and Ogg
• swing-touch system is very intuitive to use
• album art and lyrics support
• easy to use audio recording features

Cons

• subpar video playback
• only up to 128kbps quality for audio recording
• swing touch can be too sensitive

Comments (35)

jaygo said:

Thanks for the fast review. Is it true that it won't play m3u's or pls?

July 23, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

jaygo, I have just confirmed with Cowon tech support that the iAudio 7 will not play m3u or pls files directly. However, you can use the Jet Audio software to convert these files to work on the player.

July 23, 2007

Kickflip said:

Great review. Thanks so much! I'll be picking one of these up mighty soon.

July 23, 2007

F@mous said:

excellent review. definitely gives me a great incentive to buy this product! Which i probably will in the near future since my current DELL Digital Jukebox is on the fritz. Thanks!

July 24, 2007

Anonymous said:

Great review. Beats Cnet's...

July 28, 2007

Art said:

Can the battery be replaced by the consumer, or do you need to send it back to the company and have them replace it? At what charge? (This is one of the reasons that I refuse to buy and ipod.) Art

July 28, 2007

bt said:

Quick question: I have the iaudio 5 and am looking to upgrade, the 7 being one of my top choices. Two things about the 5 bother me though: it automatically fades into songs, and there is a lengthy pause between songs. From reading the review it sounds as if the load time/pause is gone. Do songs still fade in?

July 30, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

Art, the battery is not user replaceable. Like most other mp3 players, you will still need to send it in to the company to have the battery replaced.

July 30, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

bt, I didn't experience any lengthy pause but then it is subjective. I no longer have the test unit so I can no longer check this out for you. However, you can definitely try chatting with the friendly people at jetmall.net.

July 30, 2007

bob said:

So, I'd just like to confirm - I can just drop in files straight through the USB? Even from an old (10.2. Mac? My Archos XS202 just died, but maybe I'll get a second one when the first one fills up.

July 31, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

bob, I think you should be fine with using OS X 10.2 with the iAudio 7. I used my iMac running 10.4.1 for my test. But I don't see any reason why you can't use an older version of OS X.

August 01, 2007

Ken Newberry said:

If you have to stop in the middle of an audio track and turn the player off, can you pick up where you last left off when you turn on the unit back on again?

August 05, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

Ken, I can no longer answer that question. The review unit has been returned. However, feel free to chat with the customer service reps at jetmall.net . They are very helpful.

August 06, 2007

Runningflame570 said:

Yes, you can indeed pickup where you left off. I've had it for some time now so I've been able to test that. If that was a concern for you Ken, it shouldn't be. Also Kant, so probably should have thanked you for the review before now seeing how much crap I gave you in the run up to it. Thanks.

August 10, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

Thank you, Runningflame570, for your information.

August 10, 2007

henry said:

do you no how this player will work on a mac? and when it says data transfer only does this mean that it only functions as a storage device? im not a tech guy so i have no clue wat to expect.

August 25, 2007

remko said:

I just bought the iaudio 7, however i can't find the usb host function on there anywhere. If it has a usb host function, can you please explain where i can enable it?

August 26, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

henry, on the Mac, you just plug it into the USB port and it will show up as a disk on the desktop. You transfer files by dragging them in and out of the disk. Pretty simple, actually.

August 29, 2007

Luck Kanthatham said:

remko, you might wan to consult the manual. I remember it being mentioned in there. I no longer have the unit in house to test. There is another review out there that shows exactly how to use the USB host mode. Just google.

August 29, 2007

p999 said:

As for the USB host function, it has been cut from i6. I really wish it still carries it!

September 27, 2007