Digital Trends

Cowon A3 60GB February 19th, 2008 | by Mike Kobrin

Interface and navigation

Sadly, the A3's tiny pushable joystick leaves a lot to be desired. Half the times we tried to push the stick straight in to make a selection or pause a movie, we wound up moving it to one side, selecting the wrong item or jumping ahead in the movie. We were hoping Cowon had addressed this design flaw from the A2, but maybe next time. The three contextual buttons marked A, B, and C change behaviors depending on what mode the player is in; we found these helpful for jumping directly to settings without having to dive back in via the main menu.

The icon-driven main screens are easy enough for any user to figure out, but the dual-paned file browsing, which relies on file and folder names instead of metatags, could use an update. And while we can see it being useful to have a movie playing or paused and browse menus and files superimposed on top, it does make for a slightly confusing experience.

We had no trouble filling our A3 up with content from our MacBook Pro via drag and drop in OS X or via Windows Media Player 11 in Win XP. Best of all, nothing needed conversion, which we consider one of the A3's greatest features.

AV Quality: Playback and Recording

Our test MP4, WMV, and AVI files played smoothly and with vivid colors. The audio was well synced, and we didn't hear any system noise during video playback. The one glitch we ran into was with VOB files we ripped from our own DVDs; playback hiccupped every couple of seconds, making them unwatchable, though the files played back fine on all the machines we tried. We tested rips created on a Mac with Mac the Ripper and on a PC with DVDecrypter, but results were the same; we notified Cowon and the company is investigating the problem. 

Recordings we made from our cable box looked very good on the built-in screen, though even with recording quality set to maximum (in ASF format at a hefty 3Mbps and 720 x 480 resolution), we could see some compression artifacts (blockiness and shimmering) in dark and contrasty areas when we viewed them on our Samsung 40-inch 1080p HDTV. But this didn't detract too much from the big-screen experience. We did find it a little kludgy that you have to not only set the switch on the bottom to LCD Out, but you need to dive into the settings to select the correct type of output (component, composite, S-Video) as well. Other than that, recording from any analog source is a simple affair. 

All of our test audio files (mostly in 320Kbps MP3 and Apple Lossless formats, with a few OGGs and AACs in there for good measure) sounded excellent without any of the A3's bevy of sound-enhancement features turned on. We explored the jetEffect settings which include BBE (a "sonic maximizer"), 3D Sound (virtual 3D sound), MachBass, MP3 Enhance (an audio "sharpener"), and our favorite combo for acoustic music was a light touch of MachBass with some MP3 Enhance, which really livened up the sound especially when we listened in noisy environments. Add to that a 10-band equalizer, and you've got one of the most flexible portable sound systems around.

We're impressed that the A3's line-in audio recording lets you choose a lossless format (FLAC), as well as the less-exciting WMA (up to 192Kbps), though you can't record directly to MP3. Features like automatic gain control and the ability to set recording levels add an extra level of sophistication, making the A3 handy if you need to make high-quality recordings on the go.

Cowon A3 Ports