COWON PLENUE D3
The third-generation Cowon Plenue D player arrives with no boastful fanfare, despite both its previous iterations gaining What Hi-fi? Awards. Even the demure black packaging divulges little about the miniature portable music player, apart from the fact there’s now a Cirrus Logic CS43131 dual DAC on board, whereas the previous generation used just one. There’s also Bluetooth support, so you can pair your wireless headphones or speaker, and a new rotary volume wheel.
As we’ve come to expect, the PD3’S build is minimalist and chic, with a black mirror finish front and back, a matt finish on the sides, and a silver metallic panel across the top of the player. It’s also available in a gold finish.
The new Plenue D3 is a few millimetres longer and thicker than the original Plenue D, but it is almost impossible to tell. The extra depth is down to a cracking new volume dial on the top right of the player, where the power button used to sit.
This glorious rotary wheel seems like an homage to Astell & Kern and feels just as premium as its pricier competition. A recessed light shines out from beneath the dial. Here, it flashes blue when playing, or glows red when charging or loading music, but you can turn it off in the settings menu if you prefer.
The power button has been relocated to the top right side and, because there’s no need for volume buttons anymore, the three other circular controls for play/ pause, skip forward and skip back are now even easier to locate in your pocket. And the player still weighs just 103g.
The touchscreen is the same 2.8in wide-angle LCD (240 x 230) display as on the previous model. You can alter the text font and choose between three different ‘skins’. The PD3 displays album artwork and offers easy navigation and grouping of your music; given the tiny screen real estate it has to work with, that’s no mean feat. Once you get used to hopping through the settings and back to your music, the Plenue D3 is a joy to use.
Solid battery life
The PD3 boasts a battery life of up to 45 hours if you’re playing MP3 files, or a solid 30 hours when listening to hi-res files. There is support for 24-bit/192khz WAV, FLAC, ALAC and AIFF files and 64GB of built-in storage, which is expandable to 192GB with the addition of a 128GB microsd card. The PD3 boasts DSD128 file compatibility too – and that support is native, so DSD files aren’t converted to PCM during playback. Again, there’s balanced 2.5mm and unbalanced 3.5mm headphone jacks.
If the new volume wheel doesn’t tempt you, Bluetooth 3.0 might. We go into the PD3’S Settings menu, hit the Bluetooth tab and select our Earfun Air Pro wireless headphones, and later our Tribit Audio Stormbox Micro Bluetooth speaker, to pair. Both connect – and automatically re-pair – with ease.
Go to the Jeteffects tab in Settings and you can stream your music with effects such as ‘X-bass’, or more creative profiles such as ‘Feel the wind’ or ‘Reverb cathedral’, according to your tastes. There are 48 of these Jeteffects in total.
The PD3 charges via USB-C and takes around 3.5 hours to charge fully. Loading tracks, via the same port, is a breeze. We hook it up to our Macbook Pro, find it under our ‘devices’ tab and drag and drop files into the ‘music’ folder – no third-party apps required. You still need physically to connect the PD3 to your source, but when adding files is this easy it feels like the best way to do things.
Glorious separation
We cue up Queen’s Greatest Hits (16-bit/44.1khz FLAC) and there’s a glorious amount of separation on offer from the outset of Fat Bottomed Girls. Freddie Mercury’s vocal is central, but the instruments shine too – a detailed drum fill, vocal trills, guitar ideas – showing an extra level of detail on offer here that some players can’t access.
Switching to Hans Zimmer’s Gotham’s Reckoning (24-bit/192khz FLAC) from The Dark Knight Rises soundtrack, the pensive and fast-paced percussion builds to a full-bodied snap of thunder within a brooding and expansive mix, brimming with emotion and low-end punch. When considering the Cowon Plenue D3, it’s important to note that wi-fi streaming is still off the menu – so you will have to go without on-the-go streaming of Tidal, Deezer and others.
But if you like the idea of pairing your portable music player either to a wireless speaker or pair of headphones for one of the smallest wireless systems you’ve seen, there’s no better shout currently on the market for the money. The Plenue D3 keeps things simple: it plays your hi-res music – and it does that very well indeed.