Cowon iAudio E2 4 GB MP3 Player

Cowon iAudio is a screenless MP3 player which can play a lot of audio formats out of the box. It also has the proprietary BBE sound quality.

I have a D2+ and wanted a small mp3 player for my gym purposes. Decided to go for this after my sansa clip+ broke:(

I have been using this for almost 4 months now and I have used this with the following headsets.

• Sennheiser CX-300 II(in ear earphones)

  
  




• Skullcandy Hesh S6HEDZ-118

  
  

both of which are solid performing earphones/headsets.

Here are my thoughts on this little guy.

Build: 5/5

This one looks absolutely amazing. I have the light blue player and it has a classy look to it. We have well placed buttons and blind operation is a breeze. the loop on the top is not of any practical use. Its too thick to be a keychain and lets be honest, we use this as a keychain, we are gonna get a ton of scratches.

Ease of use: 5/5

As mentioned the buttons are well placed. We can skip entire folders by double pressing the next song button. Thus as long as we arrange the songs in appropriate folders, we can navigate to it quite easily. Trasferring songs is a breeze. Its get detected as an external drive. We can just drag drop the songs.

Sound quality: 3/5

Difficult to judge. The player comes with 6 BBE preset settings which can be applied based on your preference. Without these settings the quality of music is nothing worth raving about. The D2+ is leagues better than this.

Once we enable the presets, however the music comes to life. BBEmach2bass lets you hear a solid thump on your bass songs, BBEmpe is awesome for string instruments and BBEheadphones is a well rounded preset for headsets. Basically there is a preset for every requirement. However the inablility to further tweak the equalizer would be a deterrent.

Battery:

I get around 7.5-8 hrs which is quite low. ofcourse I use my D2+(52 hrs) and sansa clip+(~10 hrs for comparision)

Formats:

Supports most of the formats. mp3, wav, ogg and even flac are supported.

Overall: 4/5

Here’s the verdict. This little guy is a solid performer. The competition is either the Apple shuffle or one of the sony mp3 players or the Sansa clip+ The rest of the mp3 players(transcend, phillips etc) don’t even come close to these.

The E2 comfortably beats the Apple and the Sony mp3 player. The real competition is between the E2 and the Sansa clip+ Having used both, here’s the verdict.

Buy E2 for:

• Looks.

  
  




• Decent sound quality with BBE.

  
  




• Solid build quality and feel.

  
  




• Bundled headsets surprisingly good.

  
  

But Sansa clip+ for:

• Better sound quality(talking abt sound without presets. With BBE activated, the effects are almost identical)

  
  




• Expandable memory slot.(Not available on the E2)