Overall Sound Quality


It should be noted that listening tests are very subjective and thus, your listening experience may vary quite a bit from ours. At times we will be comparing this to the Cowon D2 since we have one in our possession and thus comparisons can be quickly done. When listening to the YP-S5, we substituted the standard (and uncomfortable) headphones out for a pair of Razer Pro Solutions M100 headphones.

When listening to the Samsung S5, you quickly realize that this player has the potential to really pump out some high quality sound. We listened to a variety of music from rock to classic to trance in all of the supported file formats and in gradually larger file sizes and were constantly amazed at the sound quality of this diminutive player. The highs were clear while the bass was quite good as well but a bit lacking when we really wanted some “oomph” in the music.


As you can see, there is a fairly wide range of user-defined equalizer and bass settings aside from the usual “Rock”, “Dance” and other presets. However, no matter how much we played around with these setting, the sound quality of the Samsung YP-S5 never met that of our older Cowon D2. Yes, the sound was great but when listening a song and format on the S5 and then switching to listen to that exact same song on the Cowon, there were differences in quite a few areas.


First of all it seems that the S5 likes the higher frequency sounds more than it does the lower frequency which basically boils down to limited bass even when the equalizer settings are tuned to give the highest bass response possible. In this same vein, we were never quite able to tune in that “sweet spot” where every song sounded just the way we wanted it to. The Cowon D2 was able to provide eyeball-rattling bass and crystal clear highs through the Razer M100 headphones but the S5 could not repeat that feat.

Other than those few very minor and highly subjective criticisms, the Samsung YP-S5 was able to deliver a rich soundstage which would be perfect for almost anyone. MP3s sounded particularly good when compared to the Cowon and even when some files were compressed, they still sounded a lot better than we expected.



Battery life was extremely good but a bit lower than Samsung’s claimed 24 hours when playing music and 4 hours of video viewing. On average we received about 19 hours of music playback with the volume set between 50% and 65% and 3 ½ hours of MPEG video playback with the screen set at its default settings. The speakers also take a significant amount of power and when using them at ¾ volume, battery life was further reduced to about three hours.

Charging time via a PC USB port wasn’t too bad at around three hours from a completely drained battery to full charge but here again we have to mention that the lack of a wall charger hurts this player. Not all of us want to keep out desktop or laptop on for two or more hours to do nothing other than charge a media player and as you will see later, an aftermarket wall charger will probably do more harm than its worth. Also, in case you were wondering; Samsung does NOT produce a stand-alone wall charger for this player. Shame.