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Topic: My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement? (Read 11287 times) previous topic - next topic
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My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

I love my COWON S9 player, but 32 GB is no longer enough space for my CD collection.

I'm interested in recommendations for other devices that have equally high audio quality that can hold more than 32GB of MP3s.  I would prefer to not have to spread it across internal and external memory (as would be needed with the COWON J3).

My preference is for a device that puts audio quality first.  I have a Samsung S3 that can do everything else, but it doesn't sound as good as my COWON S9.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #1 –
160 GB iPod classic would be the obvious choice.  Sansa player with a 64GB uSD card would also work.  Both have great analog output, a little better than what you have now with the S9.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: saratoga on
160 GB iPod classic would be the obvious choice.  Sansa player with a 64GB uSD card would also work. Both have great analog output, a little better than what you have now with the S9.

Sorry, I guess I have one other specification that it be flash-based.  Does the iPod classic have a good reputation among audiophiles?

The SanDisk Sansa players report a supported limit of 32GB on external cards.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: microUgly on
Does the iPod classic have a good reputation among audiophiles?


Why does this matter?

Quote from: microUgly on
The SanDisk Sansa players report a supported limit of 32GB on external cards.


Yeah but theres no actual limit.  You'll want to run rockbox though since the sandisk firmware works poorly with very large numbers of files. 

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #4 –
If you want to stick with Cowon, how about an X7? The white one is in stock at Jetmall However, it is HDD based.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #6 –
I finally broke down and bought and iPod classic. Still have 80 Gigs free! Got tired of the smaller capacity players. It always seemed like the one song I wanted to hear was not on the device.
--
Eric

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #7 –
You can modify some iPod classics sot that you can stick a CF card in instead of a HDD. You have to buy an adapter for it.
Worth considering.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #8 –
I bought an iPod Classic for two reasons - My MP3 collection is a little over 100GB (I need a hard drive), and since it was going to be the main music source in my vehicles, I wanted a standardized docking interface (I need an iPod).

I don’t use it as a “portable player”…  I’ve  never used the earbuds that came with it.

I don't hear anything wrong with the sound quality.  I don't think I've ever read about any specific sound-quality issues either.  And of course, I wouldn't pay any attention to what the "audiophle communty" says.*      There may have been some impedance-related issues with early iPods (causing frequency response irregularities in low-impedance headphones).  But if that's true, I'm pretty sure that's been corrected by now. 



* "Audiophiles" tend to hear things that normal people can't hear.    Except, when you do blind testing and the audiophile's hearing tends to become more like a normal person. 

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: DVDdoug on
I don't hear anything wrong with the sound quality.


Technically, it's excellent.

Quote from: DVDdoug on
But if that's true, I'm pretty sure that's been corrected by now.


The Classic still has an output impedance of 5.5?, but even with problematic IEMs, it's not that bad. It's "fixed" with the iPod Touch though (0.75? for the latest gen, which is pretty much "perfect").

Edit: the Ultimate Ears Triple Fi 10, used in the last link, are really an extreme example.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: andrew_berge on
You can modify some iPod classics sot that you can stick a CF card in instead of a HDD. You have to buy an adapter for it.
Worth considering.


Why not just get a Clip or Fuze and take advantage of the existing micro-SD slot? An Altoids box full of micro SD cards has a music capacity that taxes the imagination! Is it more than a terrabyte?

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #11 –
That is what i would do, personally (except for the altoids full of cards, too easy to lose the tiny things if you need to switch them around on the go). If the buyer has an inclination toward Apple products though, they might prefer the iPod.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: andrew_berge on
That is what i would do, personally (except for the altoids full of cards, too easy to lose the tiny things if you need to switch them around on the go).

I can only attest to µSD cards being too darn tiny. I once made the mistake of popping one out while in the car, never to be seen again.

Actually the Clip itself could be a touch bigger as well. My Western paws would appreciate that, and then one could also include a display comfortably big enough for the size 16 GNU Unifont. I've added a few Japanese bands recently, and seeing their names and song titles displayed as a bunch of boxes when tagged correctly isn't too much fun. (BTW, Amazon finally ought to get their act together and implement Unicode.)

Using multiple µSD cards is only ever feasible with a Rockboxed player, since the original Sandisk firmware insists on updating its database, which is slooooooooooooooooooooooooow (and leaves the display on all the time to boot). RB does that a lot faster when called upon to do so, and it can make use of 64 gig SDXC cards when reformatted in FAT32.

I have looked at an iPod Classic (to be used with RB, of course), but reports regarding longevity of newer samples (including robustness of harddrives) are not exactly encouraging. I'm happy to have a Clip+ that's generally working fine. (I'll spare you with the usual rant re: cheap and crappy sorts of lead-free solder this time.)

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #13 –
Thanks for all the suggestions.

After learning the Cowon J3 will work with 64GB SD card (if formatted correctly), I was tempted to stick with what I know and trust. 

But long ago I had a iPod 4G with Rockbox, and after reading the Rockbox features list again, I was reminded of all the great features I gave up when I switched to the S3.

So I've purchased a 4GB Sansa Clip Zip + 64GB microSDXC.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #14 –
Quote from: microUgly on
But long ago I had a iPod 4G with Rockbox, and after reading the Rockbox features list again, I was reminded of all the great features I gave up when I switched to the S3.

You can have those great features on the S3, if you're feeling adventurous: http://rasher.dk/rockbox/android/

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #15 –
If it must be flash based your only option really is the 64 gig ipod touch, unless you want to pay through the nose for the ultra rare 64 gig zunehd. The clip+ and I assume zip WILL work with 64 gig cards with rockbox firmware and fat32 formatting. You really should consider hdd based as the ipod classic is time tested and ive also seen used Zune 120s sell rather cheap around $100. As for your fears of hdd longevity, flash memory can fail catastrophically whereas an hdd used in ipods and zunes is made by Toshiba and quite robust. I just recently picked up a used Zune 30 locally, 2006 vintage and aside from the battery not what it once was it runs like a champ. Also replacement hdds are readily available from rapidrepair.com.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #16 –
Quote from: Mach-X on
If it must be flash based your only option really is the 64 gig ipod touch, unless you want to pay through the nose for the ultra rare 64 gig zunehd. The clip+ and I assume zip WILL work with 64 gig cards with rockbox firmware and fat32 formatting. You really should consider hdd based as the ipod classic is time tested and ive also seen used Zune 120s sell rather cheap around $100. As for your fears of hdd longevity, flash memory can fail catastrophically whereas an hdd used in ipods and zunes is made by Toshiba and quite robust. I just recently picked up a used Zune 30 locally, 2006 vintage and aside from the battery not what it once was it runs like a champ. Also replacement hdds are readily available from rapidrepair.com.



I would never characterize flash as being less reliable than a HDD. Apparently you have not seen enough failed hard drives which is strange because they are so common. I have at least a dozen failed hard drives on hand, removed from both customer machines and my own.

In contrast I have seen very few flash drives fail and I have had dozens of them. There's the one that went through the clothes washer and then spent time in the swimming pool several times and was still OK, and there there is the one that went through the same clothes washing process and failed. Then there is the one that got squashed.  That's it, two failed flash drives of dozens, both failed due to severe abuse.

The MTBF of common hard drive replacement flash drive is on the order of a million hours.

Hard drive MTBFs are given as being from 300,000 hours to 1.200,000 hours but are commonly found to be overstated by a factor on the order of 12.

If you add shock of the kind that portable players are likely to receive to the comparison, then there is no comparison!

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #17 –
Quote from: TomasPin on
Quote from: microUgly on
But long ago I had a iPod 4G with Rockbox, and after reading the Rockbox features list again, I was reminded of all the great features I gave up when I switched to the S3.

You can have those great features on the S3, if you're feeling adventurous: http://rasher.dk/rockbox/android/

Sorry, I was meant to say S9 (COWON), not S3 (Samsung). 

But this is good to know as I do have an S3 also but I can't get any decent volume out it because I gain all my albums to an equal volume which makes all recent albums quieter.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #18 –
Quote from: microUgly on
But this is good to know as I do have an S3 also but I can't get any decent volume out it because I gain all my albums to an equal volume which makes all recent albums quieter.

Oh yes, I had the same issue with ReplayGain and my collection which has both loud and quiet albums. The compressor in Rockbox was a neat solution, being the only "app" I could find which has that functionality.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #19 –
My solution was to come to understand just how advanced and capable modern codecs are at low bitrates. I store all my music as FLAC files on my ZFS storage array, but for my portable devices I transcode it to OGG Vorbis at quality 2, approx 96kbps, and neither I nor any of my family/friends knows any difference. Realistically, you're just not likely to hear a difference in general listening, and if you think you do, you're probably wrong.

User comments section follows...
   ALBUM=Black Clouds & Silver Linings
   ARTIST=Dream Theater
   TITLE=The Count of Tuscany
   TRACKNUMBER=6
Vorbis stream 1:
   Total data length: 14305314 bytes
   Playback length: 19m:16.266s
   Average bitrate: 98.975881 kb/s


A 19 minute song in 14MB.

The same song at 256kbps is almost 37MB. The Vorbis file uses 38% of the space and in general use you'd have to try, hard, to tell the difference, if you even can. You can virtually multiply the storage on your player by 3.

It gets even better if you encode your mp3's at 320kbps.

I reripped my entire collection long ago entirely to FLAC for this very reason. All my sources are lossless so as encoding technology advances I can take advantage of the quality and space efficiency gains without generational transcoding degradation. Once Opus support is widespread I'll likely start using it targeting 64-80kbps, thereby squeezing even more music into my limited storage flash based devices.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #20 –
Wouldn't it be more fair to compare file size with lame -V 4 or 5? The file size ratio would then be a lot less than 3.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #21 –
He stated he was concerned with audio quality, which I usually translate into using absurdly high bitrates and probably mp3 just due to proliferation.

Granted, a modern version of lame can keep me quite happy at bitrates of 128kbps and higher.

If he has his Cowon loaded with 128kbps mp3's the savings won't be nearly as drastic, but still noticable.  But, I'd bet a nickle his mp3's are on average north of 200kbps.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #22 –
Quote from: yourlord on
He stated he was concerned with audio quality, which I usually translate into using absurdly high bitrates and probably mp3 just due to proliferation.

Then why the comparison to OGG Vorbis at 96 kbps? That's hardly an absurdly high bitrate.

All I am saying is that it is not fair to compare bitrates unless you are comparing at comparable quality.

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #23 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: microUgly on
Does the iPod classic have a good reputation among audiophiles?


Why does this matter?

Quote from: microUgly on
The SanDisk Sansa players report a supported limit of 32GB on external cards.


Yeah but theres no actual limit. You'll want to run rockbox though since the sandisk firmware works poorly with very large numbers of files.


Are you confirming there is NO actual limit for microSD card in Sansa Fuze +, so that it can even match an iPod 120Gb as far as storage is concerned?

My COWON S9 is full... recommendation for a high volume replacement?

Reply #24 –
it supports 64GB microSDXC cards. i don't think you can buy anything bigger than that.