Cowon

Legacy_user

Thinking of buying a Cowon Prelude HD. Has anyone bought one of these. I’m having to buy from Amazon as no stockists near me to try one out, have a few questions before I get one, hoping someone can help.
1..The Cowon is a HD player, would I benefit from a pair of HD headphones. Would be over ear type, don’t rate or like ear bud types at all.
2.. I have absolutely loads of my music on the PC, it’s a variety of downloaded music, and music ripped from my DVDs. Would this be ok with a Cowon, or does it preform best with HD music.
I don’t want to waste my money, the reviews on the Cowon are very good, only other alternative is maybe a new IPod Touch, but I’m told these only work with Bluetooth headphones, and I only want to buy a pair of corded phones.

Any advice appreciated

googler

Deneva wrote: »

1..The Cowon is a HD player, would I benefit from a pair of HD headphones. Would be over ear type, don’t rate or like ear bud types at all.

There's no such thing as "HD" headphones. You get good headphones, you get bad headphones, if you spend lots of money you get very good headphones


2.. I have absolutely loads of my music on the PC, it’s a variety of downloaded music, and music ripped from my DVDs. Would this be ok with a Cowon, or does it preform best with HD music.

Depends on how you ripped it from CD/DVD or whatever. If you took a fully-digital rip from DVD, you'll probably have a 44.1kHz or 48kHz 16-bit FLAC or WAV file. If you ripped it as mp3, you're probably best to do it again.

You can get high-resolution downloads, but tread warily, for these are sometimes simply CD-standard in a high-res file.

I don’t want to waste my money, the reviews on the Cowon are very good, only other alternative is maybe a new IPod Touch, but I’m told these only work with Bluetooth headphones, and I only want to buy a pair of corded phones.

Any advice appreciated

What are you actually looking for? What's your motivation in getting a high-res player as opposed to an mp3 player or iPod?

FWIW, I have a FiiO X1 high-res player, as well as home HiFi that copes with hi-res files.

Can we assume you are thinking of the Cowon Plenue, not Prelude?

wongataa

Deneva wrote: »

I don’t want to waste my money, the reviews on the Cowon are very good, only other alternative is maybe a new IPod Touch, but I’m told these only work with Bluetooth headphones, and I only want to buy a pair of corded phones.

Any advice appreciated

There are other digital audio players out there. If you want a big brand look at Sony's offerings.

googler

The Cowon goes to 32-bit/384kHz. There's very little commercial material that will be anywhere near this resolution

An analogue transfer from DVD will be limited by whatever digital recorder you used.

Digital output from most DVD players is downsampled into a stereo output of 44.1 or 48khz, 16-bit, so even if you did a digital transfer, you'll get little benefit from the hi-res player using those files.

System

Thanks for all the advice, I'm a bit confused as to all this mention of DVD's, I never mentioned anything about DVD's. Its just a music player, all the music I have on the pc is either ripped from a CD, or downloaded online. Ive ordered a Cowon from Amazon and am borrowing a new Ipod touch from a friend to check out which I prefer, only thing I can see with the Ipod over the Cowan is that it has Bluethooth, Down side is it needs iTunes, which is something I have never really got on with, I use it with my old ipod classic, but its not user friendly at all. I plan to spend a max of £150 ish on corded headphones, Thanks for the help and advice. Oh and ive been advised if I purchase the Cowon to change all my music to FLAC format, ill do a comparison against MP3 first though.

TadleyBaggie

Deneva wrote: »

Thanks for all the advice, I'm a bit confused as to all this mention of DVD's, I never mentioned anything about DVD's. Its just a music player, all the music I have on the pc is either ripped from a CD, or downloaded online.

Yes you did...

and music ripped from my DVDs

googler

Deneva wrote: »

Thanks for all the advice, I'm a bit confused as to all this mention of DVD's, I never mentioned anything about DVD's.

Look at your OP

Deneva wrote: »

2.. I have absolutely loads of my music on the PC, it’s a variety of downloaded music, and music ripped from my DVDs.

googler

Deneva wrote: »

Ive ordered a Cowon from Amazon and am borrowing a new Ipod touch from a friend to check out which I prefer, only thing I can see with the Ipod over the Cowan is that it has Bluethooth, Down side is it needs iTunes

Down side of the iPod Touch is far less capacity than the Cowon(s), no SD expansion slot, and that it doesn't do hi-res playback.

That AND the inconvenience of having to go through iTunes to load it

Which model of Cowon have you ordered?

tonyh66

changing your ripped mp3s back to FLAC will not put the bitrate any higher than the mp3s. You will have to re-rip from your discs.

googler

tonyh66 wrote: »

changing your ripped mp3s back to FLAC will not put the bitrate any higher than the mp3s. You will have to re-rip from your discs.

This. I concur.

Use a ripper like EAC or DbPoweramp