Cowon C2 Review

• Cowon C2 Specs
• Capacity:  4/8/16GB internal (+ MicroSDHC slot up to 32GB)
• Display: 2.6″ 320×240 TFT, resistive touch screen
• Size/weight: 78.7mm x 53.0mm x 12.8mm / 84g
• Color: White with silver back / Black with silver back / Black with black back / Gray with silver back / Gray with black back
• Battery: 55h audio, 10h video (synthetic benchmarks)
• Charging time: 4.5 hours at 500mA, 2.5 hours at 750mA
• Audio codecs: MP1/2/3, Vorbis, WMA, FLAC, APE, WAV (unofficial AAC/MP4/M4A support)
• Video containers: AVI, WMA, ASF (unofficial MP4 support)
• Video codecs: Xvid, DivX, MPEG4-SP, WMV (unofficial h264 support)
• Subtitles: SMI (unofficial SRT support)
• Images: JPEG (baseline and progressive)
• Documents: plain TXT
• Recording: WMA – from internal mic, FM radio, or line-in
• Accessories: Proprietary USB cable, ear buds, printed quick start manual

The C2 comes with the bare necessities – an USB cable and a pair of earbuds.

First thing one notices is that the device is on the heavier side, considering its small size. It has the same weight as the old D2 (85g), and it is slightly heavier than the larger S9 (77g) or J3 (75g). Obviously the metal back of the C2 doesn’t add weight compared to the taller D2, yet it sure gives a sense of quality. Some people complained about the S9 being ‘too light’, dismissing it as having sub-par build quality (which isn’t the case at all, the S9 is built very well). Well, those people should be happy with the C2’s perceived heft.

Basically, the C2’s user interface can be compared to the cartoon show everybody loves and adores: My Little Pony – Friendship is Magic. So cute. So cheerful. So many colors.It is a very ‘Korean’ user interface, and different cultural perceptions of how much ‘cute’ you can pack in an audio/video player interface often led to criticism of Cowon’s design decisions from western users.

Turning the player on, one is greeted by a screensaver with ‘cute’ messages in somewhat broken English. “It’s a sunny day – getting out of bed every morning and thanking God for another beautiful day”, “Siesta now – after happy lunch”, or “Before sunset – lovers are meant to meet each other – however far they have gone, they meant to return”. Those are three of the six messages one can choose from, grammar mistakes inclusive. This gimmick gets really old really fast when one is confronted with it on each startup of the player. Pro tip: when using sleep mode instead of full power off, the C2 starts on the last used screen, not on the main menu.

Audio Playback and Sound Quality

This is what it’s all about, where Cowon leaves most of the competition in the dust. While the interface and some design decisions might give a wrong impression about the C2, there is no denying that it is a very serious music reproduction machine.

The C2’s amp is powerful enough to drive most any headphone with authority, yet it is also completely silent and hiss-free with even the most sensitive of low-impedance, multi-armature in-ear phones. Same as all other Cowon players, it might show a slight bass roll-off with very low impedance phone in measurements, but this is generally inaudible to the human ear. Dynamic range is high, distortions are very low, and channel crosstalk is perfectly fine. And yes, using an additional headphone amp on the C2’s output would be plain silly for most applications (except for driving 600 Ohm phones or unpowered speakers) – there’s really nothing to fix or improve, the C2 sounds great.

On the software side of things, it plays properly encoded files gapless (tested with LAME MP3 and FLAC). There’s nothing more distracting to my ears than pops, clicks, and silence between tracks of a live album, a symphony, or a DJ mix. Cowon are one of the very few developers that get this right – others are Rockbox and Apple, to a certain extent. However, while the S9 and J3 also play some ‘badly’ encoded MP3 files gapless (i.e. FhG or Xing encoded MP3s), the C2 is more prone to clicks between such tracks.

It supports more audio codecs than one can shake a stick at. While many aren’t that relevant for most people out there, it sure is nice not having to convert exotic formats like APE for a quick listen. The best thing is – even if Cowon doesn’t announce it anywhere – the C2 plays AAC/MP4/M4A files just fine. It displays their tags as well, only embedded album art isn’t supported (one can simply put a cover.jpg in the folder as a workaround).

The sound enhancements Cowon licensed from BBE Sound, Inc. are state-of-the-art. To my ears they’re the best, most natural and clear sounding ones found on any portable player, surpassing competitive products like SRS or DSEE. The D2 had an old, more ‘in your face’ generation of BBE effects, the D2+ a transitional set, a mix of new and old – and the C2 has the current generation, known as “BBE+”, as found on the S9/J3/i9 as well. This current set is rather refined sounding when used properly – meaning, when you don’t turn everything up to eleven.

BBE itself is a sort of musical exciter, restoring dynamics, improving stereo imaging, and giving the impression of ‘crisper’ sounding audio. BBE Mach3Bass is a phase-aligned bass booster that’s very tight and punchy – clearly superior to a mere EQ or the bass booster algorithms found on other players. BBE MP claims to restore treble portions of the signal that have been omitted due to lossy compression. While this is not really physically possible, MP sure might put some sparkle back into muddy, veiled sounding tracks. On other, better recorded tracks it might be too much and increase sibilance a bit. Stereo Enhance does exactly what it says – it widens the stereo image and provides some better spatiality to audio tracks.

Redundantly, there’s also a so-called 3D Surround feature implemented, next to Stereo Enhance. This is not part of BBE, but as far as I know a hardware feature of the Wolfson audio CODEC used in the C2. In my opinion it doesn’t provide the same clear quality as Stereo Enhance, so I never use it. Same goes for the reverb effect – it’s the usual ‘bathroom’ reverb as found on Realtek sound cards and the like. Some people sure might enjoy it, but it’s more of a gimmick than a sound improvement.

The C2’s semi-parametric EQ is also hardware-based on the Wolfson CODEC. Main advantage of a hardware based EQ over a software implementation is reduced processing power and increased battery life – not to mention it sounds really good. ‘Semi-parametric’ means the EQ has 5 bands that can be moved up and down on the frequency scale, but only in fixed steps. Bandwidth, commonly known as Q-factor, is also fixed to ‘narrow’, ‘normal’ and ‘wide’. Still, despite not being fully parametric, the C2’s EQ is a much more powerful tool than the usual graphic EQs found in other brands’ products.

The EQ and BBE tweaks can be mixed and matched to one’s personal preference, and can be stored in four user slots. If that’s too overwhelming, the C2 has several BBE presets stored, such as BBE ViVA or BBE Headphone, which are a simple one-click affair to activate. Those presets can sound very good, depending on one’s preferences and/or headphones. Cowon also added a huge amount of non-BBE sound enhancement presets; some with flowery names such as ‘Maestro’ or ‘Feel the Wind’, others more conservatively named ‘Rock’ or ‘Hip Hop’.  The audio quality of those varies – some sound good to my ears, others not so much. Either way, one of the 39 presets should hit the spot for most people’s tastes – and there are always the aforementioned manual fine-tuning options as well.

Video Playback

Be that as it may, the C2 does play videos, and its screen should be decent enough for a few Youtube clips or short cartoons on the go. In one aspect it is actually better than Cowon’s dedicated PMPs: the C2 supports EQ and BBE sound enhancements for videos – a feature the O2 or V5 sorely lack. Once you heard your action movie explosions with Mach3Bass, you certainly won’t to go back to movies with flat, boring sound.

The C2 plays almost any AVI or WMA you throw at it, up to a resolution of 800×600 without converting. It doesn’t support MPEG1/2, but those formats are a dying breed anyways. Unfortunately it doesn’t support the popular MKV container, or advanced subtitle formats like SSA/ASS. It does however support standard SRT subtitles, even if the manual only mentions the less popular SMI format.

Same as AAC/MP4 audio, the pleasant surprise is that the C2 supports MP4/h264/AAC baseline video to a certain extent – a fact Cowon doesn’t mention anywhere. This gives a far better compression-to-quality ratio than Xvid, DivX, or WMV and is today’s de-facto standard for video encoding. 

Other Options 

• Radio
• Document Viewer
• Pictures
• Voice Recording
• Flash Player
• Calculator
• Notepad
• Alarm Clock

Conclusion

The Cowon C2 is a very good audio player, packed full of features and top notch sound tweaks.The user interface works, but it’s a matter of getting used to its gimmicky looks and some awkward usability decisions.Battery life is excellent, the player’s form factor is nice and small, build quality is very solid – and the price is fair, as far as Cowon players go.

Pros

• Best-in-class BBE sound enhancements, very good sounding hardware EQ
• Gapless audio playback (with properly encoded files)
• Excellent audio codec support, good video codec support
• Undocumented features: supports AAC/MP4/M4A audio, some h264/AAC/MP4 videos, SRT subtitles
• MicroSDHC slot
• Internal memory and SD card fully integrated in audio tag browsing mode
• User-selectable MSC and MTP transfer modes
• No background hiss, loud internal amp
• Excellent battery life
• Fair amount of tactile buttons (but, alas, not enough to be really comfortable)
• Solid build quality, good look and feel
• Decent price/value ratio for a Cowon product

Cons

• Low-res TFT screen, sub-par resistive touch response
• Awkward, incoherent/inconsistent user interface, too ‘cute’ looks
• Gimmicky ‘spinning vinyl’ album art
• Sub-par support for playlists and audiobooks
• Video interface lacks pan/scan functionality
• No proper resume functionality
• MTP transfer mode
• (Semi-) proprietary USB port
• Metal back scratches very easily