Cowon X7 160GB Portable Media Player - Black

I had checked out all the available pictures but I still wasn't prepared for the size of this little beast. A chunky unit indeed but it is the price we have to pay for a screen on which videos are watchable. It would have been a perfect screen to have wifi but there is no such thing on this. A music, video and picture player in essence.
At 160GB and another 1.5GB on a flash drive within, this player is for the serious media collector or people who like their music encoded at 320 for Mp3 or Flac. Considering how legendary the sound quality is of the Cowon, it would be a shame to encode MP3s at less than 320 to play on this. Having played around with both S9 and J3, I can say that sound quality on this matches both of those.
Video resolution 480x272 is not great but okay and as I said earlier, watching videos on this is a pleasure because of screen size. Photos appear to take a bit of time to load and shift but again quite adequate. It is a surprise though that Cowon have released one with such low resolution having had the awesome amoled screen on the S9 and J3.
I know Cowon are very good with their firmware upgrades and I fear this needs quite a few. The touchscreen can at times be a bit unresponsive and although it doesn't need much pressure on the screen, at times I have had to press several times before it responded. The Bluetooth is good and has a good range without breaking up as was the case with the Cowon S9. Scanning for Bluetooth speakers and then pairing is straightforward and quick. Volume control is on two buttons on the left and respond well. The X7 has its own speakers and comes out with pretty decent volume.
There are rumours going round that this unit has problems transferring a large amount of files with Macs but has worked very well with a PC. However it did take about 5 hours to transfer 100GB of data. Once done, it shouldn't need to be done again.
A big problem appears on album art. It doesn't seem to resize the picture to fit within the screen. I wonder if this can be fixed by Cowon.
It has the usual FM radio, recorder, calculator, flash, notepad and stopwatch. None of them all that useful but these things seem to come as standard.
The deal breaker is the claimed 103 hours of music it plays on one full charge. Pretty sure this was calculated on Mp3s at 128 but even three quarters of that would be phenomenal. It claims 11 hours of continuous video.
Unusually these days, the X7 comes with its own mains charger and is supposed to be fully charged in 2 to 3 hours which isn't bad at all.
The 120GB version is also available. The spec is the same.
The manual is available on Cowon's website.

This is a fantastic product but the operating system it comes with is merely adequate and doesn't show album art correctly. However download the Sense theme from the site iaudiophile for free or the author Kizune's project site and it makes it a brilliant music player. I have used both a Cowon J3 and the X7 and with the Sense theme, this is genuinely great with lots of space.

Note the player fits into a Nintendo DS case nicely, a low cost way of carrying and protecting the player.

Although the player is bigger than the similar flash based J3 this is still perfectly portable and is often played from my jacket pocket.

Others will review the player more extensively but I wanted to add a positive note. Buy with confidence but install the Sense theme and then fill the player with your music for best experience.

cheers
Mark

Update - ALBUM ART Windows 7 64bit

I've come across the highly relevant fact that the X7 needs to have the jpeg file "Folder" renamed to "Cover" within each album-folder in order that Album Art is displayed. It is worth the hassle of renaming all the instances of "Folder" as "Cover" since one has to do this only once (then for each new CD addition) - a minor palaver. Some may not like the X7's blown-up rendering of the Album Art captured by Windows Media Player but I certainly do.
There is probably an automatic way to do this for the X7's entire music file structure but I'm not sufficiently well informed.
I simply used Control Panel and within Folder Options, unchecked "show hidden files" and "hide protected operating system files", then renamed the target files (F2=Rename;pasting the character string "Cover" over "Folder"). Remember to restore defaults in the Folder Options when finished; also the quick way to find this option is to search for "hidden" in the Control Panel screen's searchbox.
I've left the files on my PC unchanged - only altering the X7 files, otherwise you'll have problems with Explorer.

I've been using an X7 for almost a year and having enormous fun - the sound quality is outstanding & makes the overcoming of various niggles worthwhile.
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I employ the 'folder' access route as I find this the neatest solution... perfectly straightforward. I would not normally go near a "sound processor" but the BBE is extremely good and the JetAudio software provides all the flexibility a knob-twiddler could desire. I've found that this actually works very well - used in moderation.
Cowon still need to sort out the handling of album art but this is only window-dressing as the player spends most of each day quietly working away in my pocket with the display off.
The X7's UI is quite idiosyncratic but only takes a few minutes practice to master. Vertical scrolling is very fast.
One of the main decisions you need to make is the format you're going to store your music in. I started off with everything in WMA VBR at max bitrate but had for some time been performing parallel rips to create a flac library in the hope that one of the big manufacturers would come up with a device Windows-compatible & large enough HDD. Cowon has delivered the goods.
It isn't actually essential to convert to flac or other lossless. The WMA-VBR CODEC is extremely good. I find the main improvement with most albums to be a barely discernible increase in the space surrounding instruments. If you stick with WMA you'll still get a substantial improvement in audio quality arising from COWON's peerless DAC. The audio quality is sure to leave anyone dumbstruck....magnificent.
I get superb results partnered with Ultimate Ears Triple fi 10 Earphones - Metallic Blue and (with appropriate equalization) Creative Aurvana Air Earphones.

Brief follow-up: although I rarely use the FM radio, this works well and the 3x8 matrix of presets is rather neat. Nowadays I use MediaMonkey to rip the flac versions of files. I first build a WMP version in my WMA-library using WMA-VBR, copy this to my flac-library, empty this of data (ctrl-A DEL) leaving the album-art only, then copy the flac MyMusic output ripped by MediaMonkey into the flac-library (and to a backup HDD). Sounds complicated but is actually quicker than the time taken to read this procedure. While I'm not bothered about album art on the X7 it is nice to have it on the desktop's monitor. All that's left to decide is whether to drag&drop the WMA or flac versions to the X7.