Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 Review:
The Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 from Cowan will help you create the ultimate music experience with its multitude of features. Listen to your favorite music for over 60 hours with the iAudio 7’s rechargeable battery. The huge 4 GB flash memory will handle all your MP3, OGG, WMA, ASF, FLAC, WAV, MPEG4(video), TXT and JPEG files. The Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 can record to flash from its built-in FM receiver or via the 3.5mm line in. You can plug in your biggest audiophile headphones with no fear as this device pumps out 52mW at 16ohms with a five band sweepable EQ to custom tailor the sound to your exact specifications. Watch videos or view JPEG on the 1.3″ screen in 260,000 colors. The Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 even will store 200,000 lyrics and supports karaoke functions. If you are looking for a MP3 device with flexibility and features, the Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 is the place to start.

Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 User Said:

Not all the time, but a good amount of it, I’m working on computers and am often plugged into my own little world without much human contact while doing so. So imagine my glee at my boss’ permissiveness with having headphones on for 70% of my work day.

Over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of music players. I’ve had a small 1gig Cowon player, which was my first iAudio device. Using GNU/linux for my main OS leaves me looking for players that support the .ogg format. The sound quality on that Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 was what really hooked me on the brand. I’ve also had my hands on an iPod mini, shuffle, and video. They were very pretty and stylish but lacked the oomph and wide format support that Cowon offers with its players. Earlier this year I picked up a Cowon A2 for watching movies on trips and it has been a very impressive piece of equipment, but I needed something smaller for my day-to-day activities. This is where the Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 came in.

This little beast is just under 3 inches long and a little less than an inch and a half wide. Those dimensions are pretty friggin tiny, so this player hides easily in the change pocket of my jeans. The kind of unfortunate thing about Cowon’s design is that their players tend to be, well, thick. Not slim like the iPods. This one is about 3/4 an inch.

I’m not an audiophile, but I like for my music to sound decent. So I combined this player with some alien-looking sennheiser headphones, and turned up the effects that come with Cowon’s players. I aurally assaulted my ears with heavy bass hits and then coaxed them back with some subtle Mozart. After I started falling asleep, I had to start up some jazz and every instrument came across clearly. Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 player will do any kind of music you throw at it well. It covers all ranges and it really does deserve a little bit nicer of headphones than the ones that come with it. They’re decent enough, but not amazing.

Usually I’m so concerned with battery life that I keep the jetaudio effects down a bit. Not on this one. Cowon boasts 60 hours of playback with this player, so I figured if I could even get half of that, I’d be satisfied. With the effects up and playing at about half volume, I have yet to charge this thing.

I received it last week and have been using it during my work days, anywhere from 3-6 hours a day, with a good 20+ hours put in on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on top of that. I’ve had it going all morning today, as well. I’m well over the halfway point but the player is still going strong. I would expect to get at least 40 hours out of this thing. That’s under their “up to 60 hours”, but I’ve never had an iPod last me even half of apple’s projected time.

Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 player runs on everything. Windows, mac, linux distributions, you name it. It simply shows up as an external hard drive. You copy your music onto it and go.

The control scheme is a little goofy, still. The touch sensitivity is nice, and after playing around for a couple of days, you’ll get used to it, but it’s still nowhere near the iPod’s instantly friendly user interface.

Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 has a microphone built in that you can record from. I managed to record a conversation with coworkers and picked everyone up clearly, even the guy standing 7 feet away. I’m imagining all sorts of mischievous Nixon-like recordings taking place already.

Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 also picks up radio. Don’t tell the RIAA, but you have only to press one button and it will record from the radio. Oh yeah, it also has an input port, in case you want to hook a cord up between two players and record from another one onto this. You dirty pirates out there will love this. I, however, am an HONEST CITIZEN(TM) and have never once in my life recorded anything off of the radio.

If you like, you can play movies or look at pictures on this as well. The screen is about 1.5 inches diagonal and watching a movie on this would be like watching it on a gameboy micro. I have tried the text reader which seems to do a decent enough job for something so tiny, but be ready to bust out your old people specs in order to read it.

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The Short Version:

Good: Plays all sorts of file formats, has excellent sound quality, and an impressively long battery life. Small and sleek black design. Has a lot of nice extra features such as radio and a microphone.

Bad: Control scheme is hard to learn(but not difficult). Player is thick enough to spoil the beauty of the other parts of its design.

In the end Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 player is a nice alternative for those of us who like to own the music we buy(IE: buy the CDs and then import them into the computer, or buy from someplace like magnatune.com, or browse apple’s “unrestricted” music collection) or for audiophiles who don’t want to take a hit on their sound quality (FLAC player? Nice).
If you’re already part of the iPod iTunes scene, then you probably aren’t seriously looking at a player like this anyway and would likely have fewer headaches using apple’s hardware with their software.

As for me, I’m going to get full use out of this thing every day at work, and enjoy the range of perfectly crisp sound it produces. Maybe I’ll also blackmail my coworkers with recorded conversations. That could be my new career! Sounds like I’m well on my way to being an exec…

—– By J. Brothwell

Cowon I7-04SL iAUDIO 7 Features:

• MP3 Player
• color LCD
• Picture viewer
• movie player
• FM/Voice/Line-In Recorder

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