2-in-1 REVIEW: Maxell MXCP-P100 & Snowsky Echo Mini

Oh, all right. Earlier on, I was doing a bit of tidying up and uh I found a couple of things on a shelf that I'd meant to cover a while ago and I'd forgotten all about. They were things that people had asked me to review on this channel. So, I'd bought them, but then just sort of filed them away and got on with other things. So, today, let's show both of them together in one video. What are they? Well, first off, we've got just a little personal stereo cassette player branded up as Maxel. In fact, just the other day, I saw people talking about this online again. I think maybe now Maxel have gone international with this because at the time I bought this one, I imported it from Japan. It was only available over there at that point. So, we'll see, won't we? I mean, you know, it temp your expectations. The other thing that I found cassette related in a way again the snow sky echo mini. It's a little digital music player but it looks like it has a cassette animation on the screen when it's playing music. At least I hope it does. I haven't looked at reviews of any of these things. So I'm just starting completely fresh with these. But, uh, yeah, if it does have a little cassette animation, that might remind you of the Sony 40th anniversary Walkman, which I got a while ago, which does have a nice little cassette animation while it's playing. And it shows through the front there. And I just like that feature. And interestingly, the cassette type changes depending upon the quality of the music it's playing, whether it's a feric type two or a type four. The idea was nice. The execution unfortunately is a little bit lacking because it runs Android and it's an old version of Android and it doesn't have enough internal memory. You can't update it. It's kind of got stuck in time. I'd rather it wasn't Android like this one. This Sony digital music player. I'm far more likely to use this one despite the fact it's got its own proprietary connector on the bottom rather than USBC. This one dead simple. You know, nothing to it. Put your music on a SD card. That's it. That's all you need to do. you know, you don't need to update it or mess around or any of that business. So, yeah, I prefer that and I'm hoping in a way this thing is more in that kind of line. You know, it just plays music. It doesn't bug you about Android and it's got a little animation of a tape on the screen. But, I don't know. We'll see, won't we? It's probably got some severe limitations. But, uh, yeah, there we go. Those are the two things I'm going to be taking a look at today. So, let's get on with it. Okay. Now, I don't plan on spending too long on this. I just want to whiz through it really. I don't remember Maxel ever branding up a cassette player in the past. But anyway, let's have a look at it. Okay, so stop is red or is that record? That's stop. Yeah, the old famous red stop button. And um those are showing as next track. Well, that isn't next track, is it? It's not going to auto seek. It's just going to fast forward and rewind. They've put the wrong image on there. But anyway, let's open this up. Right. So, yeah, it's a usual thing. Soon as you see that big motor sticking up there that's like about that thick. I mean, if you look back at one of those old Sony's, the motor's thinner than a coin. Well, this thing's like a chunky old thing, which means all the rest of it has to be chunky. And it's the same old mech we we've seen a million times before. It's got a stereo head in there, I think, looking at that. Okay. Well, I'm going to take the plastic off here, but I'm not even allowing it to have me little bit of music because it doesn't deserve Oh, yeah. This is Oh, no. Right. So, does it have any power in it? Yes, it does. Look from Wonder how much charge it's got in that battery. Of course, you don't want to ship a lithium battery with zero charge in it. So, they're going to put some in it. But, um, let's charge it up a bit. I'm not going to use their rubbish. I've got another one here somewhere. And um whilst that's charging, I'll have a look at the other one. But um yeah. Okay. H okay. Slightly more enthusiastic about this. I mean, it's going to be an MP3 player. It'll probably play other file formats as well. It'll probably do a pretty decent job of it. This is the kind of thing that you can do on the cheap and come away with a respectable product. Yeah. If you want progress, you're not going to find it in a cassette deck. You're things like this. No doubt this has got Bluetooth output as well. I mean, you'd be much better off spending your money on something like this. And as far as that cassette deck goes, try and get an old one of a decent quality that's been refurbished. Now, this is smaller than I was anticipating, but it does have that kind of cassette dimension there, don't it? Ah, plastic. I was thinking it was going to be metal as well. So, this is really very cheap, isn't it? But, uh, it'll

probably do the job. You can see we got our controls on the top there. Does this use No, it supposed to look like it has a battery cover on. So, the whole thing's supposed to look like a little waterman, isn't it? Okay. So, we got USBC and um is that micro SD? It looks wider. No, that's I don't know. And then headphone and Oh, is that a balanced output? Wow. Okay, cool. How do these feel? Let's see if this has got any power in it. I think that's a little buckle thing. Ah, now the screen is smaller than I expected on this one. It's um owned by FO, it says there. Right, we need to get it down to English. I need to make sure we don't press the wrong thing. There we go. Right, I assume it's got some demo music built in. Let's press play and see what happens. There we go. Epic trailer theme. Okay. Wow. Now that is very stuttery. But you know it's cheapish. So what do you expect? So it's playing music there. Flag file. Let's uh pause it. I mean it's doing what you'd expect. Let's go back to the menu there. Album art display enabled or disabled. Right. So, that's what it looks like with the album art enabled. I'll be honest, I prefer the cassette. Might just be me, though. So, I'm going to change it back. I am disappointed with how stuttery that is. I don't know what's that like 10 frames a second or something. But still, there we go. It's working. So, this one, if we look at the battery here, has got plenty of battery life in it. So, I don't need to charge this one up. So, we can have a bit of a play around with this, can't we? We can try a few different file formats in it. And, uh, there goes the screen. Now, is it a touch screen? No, it isn't. So, yeah, it is just a simple device, this one, for playing back your music, but it might be enough for most people. How I get the screen back on again, I suppose, is just by tapping that. Yeah. So, the buttons were functioning while I had the screen off there, but um H okay. Well, it seems all right. It's another day. Same shirt, but different day. And I've been using it therefore for quite a while now. I was playing music on this all last night and most this morning as well, trying out different headphones, Bluetooth and wired. So, I've got a bit of an opinion about it now. And I've wor my way around the operating system. So, let's just go back with some facts. So, I've got them on the computer screen here because the old memory is failing on me. 15 hours of playback, Bluetooth 5. 3. You can get this for £50 in the UK now from Richer Sounds. I did import mine, but they're available very easily now. Apparently, a powerful headphone amp in this thing. It's also got apparently a decent DAC in it. It's got 8 gig of internal memory and you can stick up to 256 gig on the micro SD. And I connected it up via USBC to the computer to copy the files across. But of course, you can just take your micro SD out. And I did that as well to put it into my other player, which is down here somewhere. Just to have a bit of a comparison. Played the same songs on both. So I've got a bit of an opinion about that. Now, first off though, I'm just going to play you a bit of music through it only because if I don't, there'll be a lot of people say, "Why didn't you play some music in the video? " But to those who are aware of how things work, you'll know full well that whilst this might have a good DACK in it, what's your DACK like in your equipment? What bit rate is the audio file coming through to you at? Did I record it well at this end onto my digital audio recorder before I put it into iMovie and then re-encoded it and uploaded it to YouTube and it's downloaded to you again? and what headphones are you listening through those good headphones or the TV speakers or the speakers on your laptop or your phone? And you know, there's so many different parts in this chain. Me recording the audio from this is completely worthless. The only way the audio works on something is say I was playing a cassette to you and the device had terrible wow and flutter and a load of hiss and there was like a weird rumble and electronic noises in the background. Yeah, that's something you can demonstrate when it's just a digital file that I've downloaded and then re-uploaded. What is that telling anyone? But hey, if I don't put it in the video, it'll just all kick off. So, here you go. Here's some music played by this. Enjoy. Now, I just want to point out here that I'm attempting to play you a track called Emotional Mess. However, when I select it in the menu, for whatever reason, the player then plays

Lands Unknown instead. It did this before on me with a different track. And I assumed maybe I was trying to play something that was unplayable. However, this one is playable, but it just doesn't want to play. It wants to play a different track instead. So, the only way I could find to play the track I wanted was to play a track before it and then jump through the tracks until it got to the one I wanted. Anyway, I've got there in the end there. So, let's have a listen. I'm overheated. Can hardly sleep at night. doing crazy dreaming. You're the reason why. — Okay. So, what did you learn from that? Actually, don't answer that. I'll tell you what I learned from playing around with this, playing through different headphones and things. There's just something about the audio that to me isn't as involving as the music played through some of my other devices. I've got an iPhone. I've got the Sony Walkman. I've got various other digital music players. And I've got some favorite tracks and I like to play those to just to compare things against one another. And somehow when I listened to it in the iPhone or in the Sony Walkman, I was enjoying the music more than listening through this. And yet I'm sitting here and I'm trying to figure out why that is. And I'm starting to wonder, is it some kind of placebo effect because it's cheap? Am I just imagining something? But I kept going back and forth and thinking, "No, it's almost like it's kind of it's prefuncter reproduction. It plays the audio. You can hear the tune. There's no issues. There's no buzz, hiss, dropouts. There's no problem with the playback at all other than it just doesn't seem as involving somehow. " And I started to think, is this because of the sort of Apple uh what do they call it? Spatial thing on the iPhone. But I checked and the files I was playing weren't spatial. So, it wasn't that. And I tried it through the Bluetooth headphones and the wide headphones, particularly through Bluetooth. It just sounded a little bit clean and I wouldn't say thin, but it just didn't have a kind of warmth to it. There just something. I really don't know what. But look, the truth of the matter is it will play the tunes that I put into it. They sound fine. And I've got to remember this thing costs like £50 and the other things I was comparing it against cost a lot more. So yeah, it works. However, there are a few issues with regard to the control scheme and the buttons and things. Literally nothing has failed on this. There's no mad issues. It's just it doesn't inspire me in any way. Let's uh go through some of the controls and the uh system for getting around the menus and things. I'll explain as I go along what kind of things I found a little bit frustrating, but it does all work. Okay, now I've sped some of this footage up as getting around these menus is a little bit time consuming. So, please bear that in mind. Also, bear in mind how zoomed in this camera is. The album on the screen is about the same size as my thumbnail. Now, one oddity is the fact that the volume control is left for volume up and right for volume down. you know, that just feels wrong to me. Also, bear in mind that volume rocker button doubles as the track forward and back button if it's held down. However, if you activate the fast forward and rewind capability, you to skim through a track. If you activate that in the menus, then that same control also becomes fast forward. So, it's like tap to adjust the volume, double tap to skip tracks, hold down to fast forward. I don't know if there's a shortage of buttons in China at the moment or something, but I would have preferred separate volume and navigation controls. Now, since the album art is so tiny, for me, I felt it was better if I just turned it off because then I got the cassette animation instead. It still had the information I needed on the screen as far as what track, etc. was playing. However, the animation itself is rather basic. It's just a loop. It doesn't advance the tape in any direction. And as we mentioned before, it seems to stutter quite a bit. It's got a low frame rate. It's probably just an animated GIF or maybe an animated GIF. But either way, I don't really like it. But I'll show you some of these settings options. Now, there's quite a few things in here. There's pretty much everything that most people could need. I mean, there's stuff to do with adjusting the gain on the headphone amplifier and the roll off or whatever. There's stuff I wouldn't mess around with. There are various EQ options in here for the sound, although I've just found that they made it worse everyone that I tried. So, I found it was sounding better with them deactivated. But you

could, if you wanted to, define your own EQ using a little graphic equalizer. Now, this is just one of those MP3 players again that seems to put the tracks in whatever order it feels like. I suppose somehow this is my fault. I don't know what I've done wrong, but bear in mind when I put the same SD card into the Walkman, it just shows the tracks in track number order instead. I think if I was using this regularly, I might just embrace the madness and stick the whole thing in shuffle play and use it as a random music player. That might be one way to get around the fact that everything seems to be in the wrong order. Now, as far as the screen goes, there are various different color options for that, various themes, some of which are more legible than others. I found the contrast between the text and the color was a little bit difficult to read at times, but then again, for me, the whole thing is really at the limits of my deteriorating vision. The other issue that I found was with the lack of compatibility with some of the music files I've got. Only the AAC ones, your M4A and I wrote another one down, Aif. If you don't have any of those, M4 AF, you'd be fine. I mean, it plays pretty much everything else, including OG Vorbis. But yeah, quite a few my music files perhaps out of an Apple library in the past. You can't drag those into here. It'll put the folder in, but there'll be no files that appear under it. You can't play them. Um, I think that's perhaps it for this one. So, yeah, it's not a joyful object for me to use and I don't know if it should be at £50, but I've got so many other devices. Perhaps I've been spoiled. It does its job. It functions on this issue that I've got where I think the music just sounds kind of preuncter. It's just it's going through the motions of playing it, but it's somehow not involving me emotionally in the same way that some of the other devices have. Maybe I'm just getting all arty farty, but I don't know what that's about. But yeah, everyone, as far as I can tell, seems to think this is all right. So, we'll just say that's on me. So, yeah, it works. It'll play your music. Let's move on. Okay, so what's special about this? Absolutely nothing. It's the same device I've shown numerous times in the past with various different brandings on it. In this case, it's Maxel, who are not a known manufacturer of electronics, so therefore, you shouldn't expect them to make anything like this. And of course, they don't. They're just asking somebody else to stick their logo on it. They're known for their cassettes. And indeed, you can still buy Maxel Type One cassettes here in the UK on Amazon. They're readily available, new, and this device, therefore, is really just a companion piece for those because it only is compatible with type one cassettes. It isn't compatible with type two or type four. Yes, it will play them, but there isn't a switch to put the right equalization on. So, they're going to sound a little bit thin and tiny if you try and play them on this. Also, with Dolby B, and this doesn't have that on it, but a lot of people prefer to switch that off anyway. So, what does it have? Well, it has play, rewind, fast forward, and stop. It has Bluetooth output, headphone output, and uh USB C charging. Of course, the volume control up here. And that is it. Oh, that clip on the back, by the way, that can be removed to make this thing into a ultra slim personal stereo. Let's just take that off there. There we go. You can barely see that now, can you? You'll see a little hole there, though, that you can use to adjust the speed on the mechanism in case it's running fast or slow. Uh, that has a little screw on the motor. And generally, these things tend to run about half a percent fast or slow, this mechanism, and around about sort of 0. 40. 5% on the worst case. Wow. and Flutter. It's a competent mechanism that works reasonably well, but that is about it. It doesn't do anything particularly exciting, and we've seen this mechanism plenty of times before. And indeed, this case design is nothing new either. There's nothing Maxel about this apart from that, that model number. Other than that, this is just a product sourced from a factory, and they've just asked them to stick their details on it. I'll prove that later on. But uh yeah, as far as the cassettes go, since this works on type one and it's Maxel, I recorded some stuff to a Maxel type one in one of my Sony decks with no noise reduction on there, of course. And we'll play a little bit back of that later on. Now, one thing that they make particularly um big deals about or a big deal about is on the back of the box here, the fact it's got a metal flywheel, a brass flywheel. If you have a brass flywheel, you're going to get better w and flutter measurements because of course you got a bit of inertia going on there. But maybe it's not going to make all that much difference because there's more to it than just a brass flywheel. So I think the first thing we should do, I'll play a little bit of audio from here, something I've recorded myself off the

YouTube audio library. And then I'll test the W and Flutter. And uh then I just want to show you something that's a bit of a problem with these type of things and a reason why you might not want to put that clip on the back of them. — You got me babys don't hurt me baby. Yes. Yes, I'm an emotional mess. Yes, but you wouldn't want me less. Yes, — the results are kind of what I'd expect. The speed is a little bit better, but you know, that is a complete random one. Sometimes it'll go one way or the other. As far as this one goes, not much you can do about that one, but fortunately, we're looking at around about just under 0. 4% wow of flutter there. It seems to have steadied itself at that position. So yeah, those are the results as expected. But uh yeah, I just want to mention something. If you do touch this Whoa. Let's come back to that. Okay, so earlier on I suggested that you might not want to bother attaching the belt clip to the back of this. Well, why would that be? Well, the reason is because you probably don't want to move this whilst you're listening to it. Rather than being a type of Walkman or a copy of one, I suggest that this is a category of its own. This is a static man or a don't move or a stop man or a just stay exactly where you are man. Whatever you do don't shake this thing about while you're listening to it man. I'll just demonstrate to you exactly what the problem is. just one other limitation I forgot to mention with regard to this particular mechanism. It does have auto stop on play. You'll see here I'm just playing to the end of this tape and in a second we're going to reach the end of it and the play button will pop out. There we go. Automatically. So, it's stopped. However, it doesn't have auto stop on fast forward or rewind. In fact, if I was to fast forward, which I'm just trying to remember the correct direction for that given that everything's upside down. Right, just have a listen to this. Yeah, that squeal is the clutch just spinning around or clutch of sorts. It's a very basic Mac, so it just keeps spinning and it will do that until your battery runs down or the thing breaks. So yeah, you got to be careful if you're fast forwarding or rewinding. Make sure to press stop once it reaches the end of the tape, but it will auto stop on play. Okay, now I did promise that this particular device is in no way unique. So, let's introduce the Max Cell to its twin, the Gracioso. And that's going to be one of, I don't know, a dozen different names you could get on one of these devices. So, just have a look around here. You can see same on the top. Obviously, different types of buttons, but uh at least they put the right legends on these ones. If we look on this side, spin it around. USBC, Bluetooth button, volume control. Got to say, by the way, Bluetooth was working fine on this. I'd imagine it worked just fine on this as well. No issues at all with that. Didn't have any kind of buzz or hum or any of that business. It was just fine. But yeah, uh these things are the same as one another. One slight positive to this other one though is the fact that it's got this clear back on it. So you can see the mechanism in operation. So if we just press play on there, you probably can't see much actually, but that's spinning at the moment. Let's just stop it. There we go. So that's the belt going down there and down to there. So there's no need to pull the back off this one to have a look inside it because we can see everything that we need to inside this one. So yeah, I mean that is the same device, but the thing with this is in the UK. I don't know if you can get hold of a Maxel, but I know the general price for these online seems to be somewhere around about $80, $100. This thing UK 38 quid delivered next day from Amazon. Here's the box for it. And inside the box, you get USBC, you get the clip for the back of it, you get your headphone cable. So, if you really do think one of

these Max cells is a brilliant idea, well, you could get the exact same thing quite a bit cheaper and there's pretty much no differences between them. But then again, perhaps Maxel have used their amazing abilities to produce one with a better wow and flutter and a better speed on it. So, maybe we should find that out. Let's have a look. Okay. And I thought it was only right to do the same test with this. Although I haven't played through a load of tapes with this. I've just plugged it straight in. These are the results. And as you can see, well, if we start on the left, that speed is off the charts. We're going to 1% at the top. So, it's more than 1% fast. Let's put 3% in there. See if it calves itself down. Yeah. So, it's um somewhere between one and uh it's getting just under two there. So, yeah, around about 2% fast. We'll have a look at that speed adjustment in a moment. Uh, it's a good example of how to alter that and why you'd want to. As far as this goes though, well, the flutter actually looks a little bit better than the other one. Uh, let's uh put that to a. 3 scale. So, we're looking at the bottom row now. Yeah, look at that. 0. 15% wow and flutter all thereabouts. It just shows these things are a little bit variable from one another. And it's not because one's better than another. It's just variations in the actual production of the mechanism. Uh if we move this one around though, yeah, you can see again straight off the top of that scale. So yeah, it's um got the same issues as far as the movement goes. But uh yeah, let's just uh adjust that speed. So we'll lock it to 1%. I just want to show you something on here. There's our speed adjustment hole. And I thought that would be going straight through to the motor, but obviously not because that's all the way over there. And there's our brass flywheel spinning around. So, we're just in a pot when we're altering this. I'll see if I've got a thin enough screwdriver to get in there and see if we can get that speed a little bit more where it's supposed to be. It's very fine the adjustment, of course. I think we might have it there. No, bit more to the left. You can see how these things are out from manufacturer because the tolerance between being the right speed and being like just even half a percent out is very fine. But we'll take that out of there. And as you can see now, we've got the speed pretty much right. So that'll do. Where the heck did I put my glasses? I only wear them to look cool for the internet. Oh, there we go. Right. Okay. So, a video about two things that perform exactly as I would have expected them to perform. They uh do what they say they will do. This plays tapes. This plays digital music files. You couldn't send either of these back and say, "Look, it's not doing what it said it would do. " So, yeah, in that regard, you buy this to do that and you buy that yeah, it'll do it. Neither of them are doing a particularly amazing job in my opinion. Uh, but neither of them have failed at their task either. This one, um, yeah, I mean, just get a cheaper version if you really want that design. You'll be able to find one somewhere. And I'm not just saying this model. It's one of many that use the exact same internals. And you might find some of them in different shells, but you're going to get a roughly similar performance with all of them. And every time some company comes out with a bit of a promotion on like social media say, "Look, we've come out with a new cassette player. " Well, first off, look at the company. Maxel don't make cassette players. So, you know, you use your noggin of it. I mean, obviously, they've just got to badge something they found somewhere else, same place these people found it, but they want a lot more money for the same thing. And uh yeah uh design tolerances sorry manufacturing tolerances between different models from the same factory will produce slightly different results on a wow and flutter meter but the general gist of the thing is yeah they're all the same. Now there are people out there like the we are rewind people who are making a little bit of an effort to try and improve the mech and put the different amplification circuitry around it and you know all that kind of stuff. They're actually thinking about it. These people are just getting something off the shelf and putting a sticker on it. And the FO people, I believe they were working on a new mech that was going to be thinner, but it keeps getting put back. I believe at the date at the moment is the end of 2026. So, it just shows it's not easy just coming up with a new tape mech, which is why everyone's using the same mech or very similar or slight variations on, you know, it's this mechanical thing with the buttons. you know, if somebody comes out with one of these with all touch controls in a super slim case, then yeah, give me a call. But, uh, these things, they're all going to be the same. Right now, as far as this thing goes, um, it's all right. You know, I don't enjoy using it. And I

think that is a big thing to me. Tactility and design is quite important on something I carry around all the time or I would time. It's got to have a nice feel to it. Then again, on the other side of this, it weighs almost nothing. I mean, you wouldn't even know you were carrying this thing around. You could quite easily lose it in a pocket. It's like a box of Tic Tacs. It has much the same plastic quality as well. But again, it performs its function. It does what it says it'll do. But I'm not going to endorse either of these things. I'm not in the business of doing that. But yeah, these are things that people asked me to take a look at. So there you go. I've took a look at both of them. I found an alternative for one. The other one's all right, but there's a million media playing devices out there. So, I don't think it's anything particularly special. Get the one that kind of moves you. The one that when you look at it, you go, "Oh, I'd like one of those. " And get that one. If that happens to be this, fair enough. But, you know, I'd uh I'd buy an MP3 player with my heart and then I'd buy a cassette player with my mind. And if I was buying one, I'd be buying an old one if I possibly could and making it, you know, getting someone to do it up if I could find someone or buy one that someone else has already refurbished and all that. But I've got plenty of cassette players. So, I'm all right, Jack. But for anyone else who thinks they're going to get uh something amazing by buying this, they're getting something very normal. And uh be very careful not to move it around while you're playing it. Pretend it's made of gelite. Anyway, that's it for the moment. As always, thanks for watching.