A-MAX Technology CD / MP3 / VCD player

Two years ago, the Napa DAV310 was one of the first MP3/CD players on the market. Its RRP was about £120, and I bought mine for £85 - which is not too bad, even by today's standards.

The DAV310 is a combined CD-audio, MP3 and Video CD player, runs off an internal rechargeable Li-Ion battery, and comes with an infrared remote control - unusual for a portable player. Its white and orange casing is garish to say the least - an optimist ...
...well laid out and adequately sized. Build quality is reasonable - the lid is a bit flimsy, but when shut, the unit feels solid. The remote control is a credit-card sized unit with flattish buttons, not unlike the remote controls you get with modern camcorders. You get a pretty basic manual in the box, but it covers everything and it's not bad, to be fair.

Operation of the unit is pretty basic if you don't have the remote control with ... more

Two years ago, the Napa DAV310 was one of the first MP3/CD players on the market. Its RRP was about £120, and I bought mine for £85 - which is not too bad, even by today's standards.

The DAV310 is a combined CD-audio, MP3 and Video CD player, runs off an internal rechargeable Li-Ion battery, and comes with an infrared remote control - unusual for a portable player. Its white and orange casing is garish to say the least - an optimist would call it an anti-theft feature. Its buttons are well laid out and adequately sized. Build quality is reasonable - the lid is a bit flimsy, but when shut, the unit feels solid. The remote control is a credit-card sized unit with flattish buttons, not unlike the remote controls you get with modern camcorders. You get a pretty basic manual in the box, but it covers everything and it's not bad, to be fair.

Operation of the unit is pretty basic if you don't have the remote control with you - press play and away you go, skip tracks at will - you can also search through tracks by holding down the skip buttons, on MP3s just as you would on an audio track. The Mode button allows you to change the shock protection mode and play order (repeat/shuffle - no random). There's a hold switch on there, too, to prevent accidental pressing of the buttons, and a bass boost switch - though with the supplied headphones this only leads to distortion.

The remote control is where the DAV310 comes into its own - when you have a disc full of MP3s, skipping to track 175 using the Next button gets tedious, but you can tap in 175 on the remote and away you go. On audio CDs, you have the bizarre option of slowing down or speeding up playback by up to 8%, as you would on a DJ turntable - why you would want to do this I don't know. I can only presume that they had three spare buttons on the remote control and didn't know what to do with them.

Playing MP3s off the DAV310 is simple - pop the disc in, press play, and it detects the disc as an MP3 disc, spends about ten seconds reading the drive to find out how many tracks are on there, and gets going. The player comes with up to 30 seconds anti-shock protection, although it is by default set to "power saving" mode, where it will fill up the buffer, then stop the disc, then spin up with about five seconds to spare, re-fill the buffer and stop again. This means that the rechargeable battery lasts around five hours when away from the mains. MP3 reproduction seems reasonable - the player can go quite loud, especially when coupled with a decent pair of over-the-ear headphones - and the quality is good on both constant and variable bitrates from 64 to 256kbps - though don't expect high bitrate tracks to play well off a scratched disc.

I haven't tried playing discs with many folders on, I've been told that it handles folders, but when I've split the CD into folders it has taken a lot longer to load. It also takes longer skipping between tracks when folders are involved.

To set up the DAV310 to play video CDs, all you have to do is plug it into the charger, and plug the audio and composite video outputs into your TV, and hit Play. Sitting on top of the TV is the ideal position for the DAV310, because the remote control doesn't work at all angles. Hardly surprising, considering how small the IR receiver on the device is.

When playing video CDs, the DAV310 performs adequately - it is by no means as good as a PC for playback, and if you try to play a dirty or scratched CD you may find that it just won't work; this is because the CD can only spin at a certain speed and its buffer is not huge. There is a handy "Digest" button, which splits the CD up into nine sections and displays the start of each section, allowing you to quickly jump to within about five minutes of where you left off. The bizarre playback rate control works on VCDs too - but why you would want to do this, again, I don't know.

So far, so good, you think? That's what I thought, too. However, the DAV310 revealed its shortcomings to me very quickly.

Firstly, the display works by track number only - there's no title display. This is OK if you recorded your MP3 CD in alphabetical order, because you can guesstimate where a particular track will be. I did take to printing out track listings, though.

Secondly, the anti-shock would fail on occasions, and crash the player. This required that the player was restarted. On more severe occasions, the disc would somehow end up spinning in the opposite direction, at about five times the speed it should. I'm not sure how this happens, but it does. It could be to do with using the power-saving mode - if the disc has problems spinning up, or is jolted, it seems to be sent the wrong way.

Thirdly, when you play variable bitrate (VBR) MP3 tracks, the track time display goes mad. It seems to recalculate the track time depending on the current bitrate, rather than simply timing how long it's been since the start.

Whilst the third problem is but a minor fault, it's a niggling little problem that I couldn't be doing with.

Sadly, after over two years, my DAV310 took a bad knock when my bag fell off an overhead luggage rack on the train - it landed straight on it, and has never been able to play since. However, last weekend I treated myself to a Thomson Lyra MP3/CD player for £45, which has proved much more reliable and better in every respect.

Overall, I'd say that this model is more than a little outdated now - you can get players with full ID3 tag display, more and better anti-shock, and players with part-metal casing. If you get given one, celebrate. Otherwise, take your money elsewhere. It was revolutionary for its time, but its time is long gone now. 

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