I bought this little 1gig MP3 player almost 10 years ago and apart from the ear-phones that came with it, (which were absolute crap!) it gets five-of-five stars from me. The quoted 50-hour playback time is a joke by the way - with a 2800mAh rechargeable AA battery and at moderate volume, you are lucky to get 30 hours, never mind 50. With the radio going, you would be even luckier to get 8-10 hours. Much less when recording from the radio.
Before anyone thinks that alkaline batteries would fare better, question - off the top of your head, what is the capacity of say, a Duracell Alkaline AA cell? Most of us have been brainwashed into believing that Alkaline batteries are heavy-duty, longer-lasting etc. Yet not one Alkaline battery maker states the battery capacity on the cell itself - why do you think that is? The reason is that Alkaline battery performance is heavily dependent on the load that they are powering. In fact for heavy load applications, alkaline's seriously under-perform almost any rechargeable-type, even old Nickel-cadmium batteries. They perform much better when powering loads in the 10's of milliamps, a AA delivering around a 4500mAh performance - so not any better than the best NiMH's. Yet all the hype (especially around Christmas) would tend to suggest otherwise! But I digress. [Edit: (2.5 years on) Dunno what I was thinking when I wrote this - I had NiMH batteries down as 4800mAh capacity, instead of 2800mAh. If a new Alkaline can deliver 4500mAh, then in theory, it should last almost twice as long as a high-capacity 2800mAh NiMH battery! Sigh.]
One thing that has been bugging me for years with this MP3 player was the way it would power off unexpectedly when it received a jolt. Recently it had got so bad that I resolved to get to the root of the problem. But opening it proved a bit of a nightmare. Its innards are after-all enclosed in an aluminum tube and I could see no way of removing either of the plastic ends, so in frustration, levered off one, breaking stuff in the process. It turns out that there are 2 tiny screws holding on one of the ends, which are accessible and visible (barely!) when the battery is removed, and with the right screw-driver.
Fixing the powering-off proved simple, just cleaning & re-tensioning a type of leaf-spring contact that it uses. Putting it back together, after having first used Araldite to repair the opening-damage, proved easy enough, but only to discover that one of the buttons no longer worked. Opened again, the reason was obvious - the 'switches' form part of the plastic enclosure case and one of them had cracked off, quickly followed by another as I inspected things. Not new damage as it turned out, both were the 2 most-used switches and their repeated-flexing was the killer, so the others will almost certainly succumb similarly given time and usage. Using more Araldite I managed to at least get them working again but something like Evostik would have been a much more sensible way to go, if I had had any.
Back together again, I next noticed that recording from the built-in 'Mic' no longer worked, it defaulting to the 'line-in' connector instead. Recording from the radio worked fine. Opened it again, but nothing obvious was amiss. In retrospect, I now think that this may have stopped working a long time ago, as it's something I never check, let alone use. But then I wondered if it might be a software problem.
The company (CMtech) itself seems to have gone out of business, with its web-site having vanished. I had bookmarked its software download page, which for posterity may be seen here via the Wayback web-archive, although its software download links are no longer working. Anyway, I still have the software for my device, so updated its firmware, but all for naught. It was while doing this I managed to effectively kill the device completely, with it no longer even being detected by the computer. This was a first, it looked real bad...
Then when I had all but given up hope I accidentally discovered a way of reviving it! Hold the power-button down while you plug it into the computers USB port. Doing this causes the computer to detect a never-before-seen "Sigmatel" device, which XP then diagnoses as being a "Player Recovery" device, and succeeds in installing a driver for it. The "Sigmatel" device then vanishes to be replaced with the MP3 Player device I.D again. Hurray!!!
Since the software is no longer available online, I've uploaded the firmware for my device (CA-F200) which may be downloaded from the below links. There are two applications, the big one installs on the computer and allows customisation of the device from the computer, as well as flashing of the 'old' firmware version. The other was the latest firmware, whose major enhancement was the ability of recording from the radio as an MP3 file.
CA-F200 Firmware
Edit:
The less-than-stellar performance of the Ruizo X06 prompted me to do some battery-endurance tests on the CMTech by way of comparison. I was particularly interested in the radio-side, both while being listen-to and being recorded-from, something I'd never done properly before.
As the power source, I was using Eneloop (2nd gen) 1900mAh AA batteries. These beauties deserve an article in themselves - they are superb batteries! I bought a set of 4 about 5 years ago, along with a set of 4 Varta Power Accu 2800mAh rechargeables. Back then, using an AcuPower IQ-328 charger, I tested both, and was amazed at the stable, reproducable results I got from the Eneloop batteries. Naturally, they all performed to spec, each coming in close, but always greater than the stated "1900mAh minimum". The Varta's also performed close to spec, but from the get-go, their results always varied by a wide margin with the above charger. Sometimes they would only take a fraction of their expected charge, before indicating "Full" on the charger, other times they'd take far more than their capacity, but when tested immediately, the results would vary a lot, and usually to the down-side. Today, after having undergone maybe 50 charge-cycles, and certainly less than 100, the Varta's are already toast, all delivering capacities between 500 - 1000mAh. The Eneloop batteries on the other hand, with at least the same number of charge-cycles, are still coming in at spec - like I said, really excellent batteries!
But I digress. I did three separate runs with the CMTech CA-F200, volume-level set at 12 (of 30). It ran for the following times before powering-off;
Playback only: 32 hours.
Radio only: 21 hours.
Radio being recorded @ mp3 64kbs: 8 hours.
The radio-only time especially surprised me. This comes in at twice the stated radio-time of the Ruizu X06 (or the AGPtek A06 rather - Ruizu's quoted-times are a joke!) which is a proper stereo-signal, and not the pissy mono-signal delivered by the Ruizu! Hell, the radio-record figure of the CMTech is almost as good as the Ruizu's radio-only time. It would be too depressing to go testing the Ruizu's radio-record time. The CMTech's playback-only time of 32 hours is also very impressive. Considering that this is from batteries with a known, measured capacity of 1900mAh, it now seems quite feasable that this little player could indeed achieve a figure close to the 50 hours-playback claimed by the manufacturer - a figure I ridiculed above! Truth is, I have never tested this with alkaline batteries, whose capacities are supposed to be significantly higher than the 1900mAh that the Eneloop's deliver. But, never say never - I might do it yet!
If nothing else, this testing has re-affirmed to me what a great little player the CMTech CA-F200 really is. When compared to the Ruizu X06, its firmware is better in nearly every respect. The one thing missing from it is a 'Bookmark' option, something the Ruizu has, although it's a poor imitation of what a proper bookmarking option ought to be. It's a shame the company behind the CMTech went bust. Sob.
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