Gear is good

Do you see this sexy slab of plastic?

It is the Cowon (iAudio) S9.

Aside from being packed with more than a few useless features, it does have one very important one;

You are looking at a 5 band parametric equalizer with not only selectable centre frequency, but limited Q control, providing three preset bandwidths; Wide, Normal and Narrow for notching frequencies.
This is relevant to my interests.

I bought one of these sexy slabs of plastic.
With 32gb in.

I farewell my trusty old iAudio X5L whose legacy shall live on forever; its benchmark 35 hour battery was way ahead of its time.
The S9 however ushers in a new era of mp3 player; a low energy LED screen and being flash based rather than spinning a HDD make for a quoted 55 hours from a single charge under test conditions. Considering I got up to 25+ hours from the 35 quoted on the X5L, I’ll be more than happy with anything over 30, and imagine I will be polling total usage times of 35 – 45 hours.

Touch screens are a almost a non-feature for me, with the exception of one very handy feature; a time-slider for instant hopping around files.
Excellent.

While I will never watch video on it, nor use the radio, nor the Flash games and apps or text viewer, its pure audio-player functions are exemplary.

Most importantly of all though, it still allows me to organise and navigate my music via directory-structure.
Meta-data is great for useful information, but as far as navigation and organisation goes, can go to hell.

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Less exciting than this was the delivery of the multi-region Kogan Blu-Ray 2.0 player.
It plays Region A discs and doesn’t cost an internal organ.
My final verdict on Blu-Ray is that overall aliasing and artifacting are greatly reduced, and film-grain is more visible, something which is absolutely welcome. In perhaps another two increments of resolution, we may see digital responding in as good a fashion as print. 3000 pixels just may do it.
Lossless and uncompressed audio are fantastic things. Like ultimate resolution, it’s not always important, but when the soundtrack of a film or recording has depth to offer, it obviously benefits from the higher data-rates.