Review: Cowon Plenue J – face up

The J’s battery also works like a charm. It just goes and goes. Not quite as far as Plenue D’s does. I measured the D hitting upwards of 86 hours under mixed use. The J gets less than that, but it remains consistent pulling out around 30 hours for heavy hi-res music playback and loads of setting changes, and certainly more than 45 when running straight out playing MP3 and other lossy content.

Its drawbacks: a yellow-tinged screen, laggy UI, lack of balanced, no DSD, should be something of a nothing burger. But, because the DP-S1 is out, costs the same, and does DSD and balanced, it’s kind of a whopper of a miss for the audiophile market. That said, I much prefer using the J to using the DP-S1. It handles better, is smaller, and feels better in the hand. Both UIs lag, but J’s lags more, making it easy to overshoot the song, or album, or BBE setting you want.

The DP-S1 strong-armed the medium-budget DAP niche, not only gracefully doing DSD, but sporting hella good output from both its balanced and single-ended ports, and outperforming players many, many, many times its price. The J’s hardware tracking forward/backward engine works backward. From the screen, swiping to the right tracks forward, as it should. But clicking down, rather than up proceeds to the next track. The two are competing, not complementing ideas, which shouldn’t be unified in a single interface. It is a strange oversight from a player which otherwise is strapped to a good hardware and software UI.

The above is longhand for a simple truth: Plenue J isn’t a world-changing medium-budget DAP. It performs well but not at the top of its class. It looks great, and is made in Korea, rather than China. I lived two years in Korea. Great food. Energetic and fun people. Sidewalks that fall apart every six months. Buildings that collapse on their patrons. But Koreans know electronics, and Korea is ultra-modern and not a cheap place to live. That Cowon can manufacture in Korea and still command middling budget for their Plenue line is a credit to Korean industriousness. And the no-nonsense hardware UI is a credit to Korean focus on design.

It starts up pretty fast, unifies files from the card into the main library, but selectable folder, album, artist, and more, means that you have good control over what, and how you want to play the files you want to play. Cowon’s AB playback has always been a boon- both to language learners and for the dude or dudet wanting to bone up karaoke skills. Browsing starred (favourited) files, year, and more, is as easy as swipe from the main drag. You can also easily search songs or albums with text input. Of course, general UI lag means that that deliberate fingers are a must.

Plenue J’s general design loveliness is mitigated by a few strange misses. Overall, however, it is nice to use.

Sound

Sound and more after the jump: