COWON A2 PMP PLUS

CD players have done gapless playback for 25 years! What are they, imbeciles?Д«ecause manufacturers are buying codec libraries for many of their formats from vendors and dropping them into whatever framework they've written or licensed elsewhere. I wonder why virtually every manufacturer fails at this point. You can always use disc images of course, but since there's no cuesheet support yet, you can't seek to specific tracks.Yet another useless player for now, then. I mentioned this to the engineer who did the WavPack integration and he said it was something on his 'to do' list, but he wasn't sure when it would happen. Quote from: absence on 21:45:40 But does it have gapless playback?Unfortunately, no. But, anything that will play APE normal will play any WavPack or FLAC without even breaking a sweat! The iAudio line is so big that they probably have all sorts of CPUs in use (I know ColdFires are in the units Rockbox supports). I believe they still only go up to APE normal, although I haven't seen that admission anywhere for the A3 yet (maybe they're close to having вЂњhighвЂќ working). Even the highest WavPack mode takes less than 75 Mhz from an ARM core (in an iPod). The ARMs in those run in the 200-300 MHz range, so there's quite a lot of CPU available.

COWON A2 PMP PLUS

The A3 has got one of those TI DaVinci chips which has an ARM core plus some dedicated video processing hardware, and I believe TI supplies Linux with it. also they previously only supported ape fast and normal which I think is still the case.

Quote from: jcoalson on 01:37:15 that is pretty cool, I wonder what cpu is in there to do wavpack extra high, some of their earlier players were getting close on flac -8. Well, the A2 display is 480 x 272, but on the identically sized A3 this has been upped this to 800 x 480! I just hope they make ATSC an option for the US release (right now only DVB-T is available).ДЄnyway, here is an official spec sheet on the German Cowon site (I haven't seen an English one yet) and here is an independent look including a video of the unit in action. I have an A2 and have been very happy with the video quality and brightness on its 4' display. But I think maybe part of this marketing decision was to go after the вЂњhigh-endвЂќ type of user that hangs out here, and I think that Cowon should be applauded for that. It's obviously nice for the average user to be able to just copy over any file and have a pretty good chance that it will play. I believe that it is also the first PMP to support the Matroska container. I was jazzed because it has complete support of WavPack, but it also has 4(!) other lossless audio formats and tons of other audio and video codecs.

The interesting thing about this player, and what might make it particularly appealing to HA members, is the vast array of formats it handles.

It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps everyone doesn't read every WavPack thread from top to bottom, so it might be a good idea to mention the new Cowon A3 PMP here also.