Originally Posted by
onetrack
This is not sounding good, if the CVR casing has burst open with the impact.
It depends what the Navy spokesman meant by the "CVR casing".
It's not clear which vendor's CVR the aircraft was equipped with (flight recorders are BFE, specified by the customer). It will almost certainly have been either an AlliedSignal/Honeywell or Fairchild/L3 unit. Both share the same basic construction: a chassis, onto which is mounted (i) a box with circuit boards and (ii) the memory module. The latter is encased in a hard shell, typically stainless steel or titanium, purpose-designed not to fracture in an impact. The ULB is mounted on the memory module, since of course that's the bit that it's most important to find.
So it's not immediately obvious which of the above the spokesman was referring to when he referred to the "casing". I wouldn't rule out finding the memory module shell with its content protected and intact, as it is designed to do.
Edit: Found a video of the recovered CVR chassis from yesterday, which confirms it's an L3 (originally Fairchild) FA2100. It is indeed mangled, with all the electronics visible - but that's the non-crash-survivable part of the CVR and its condition has no bearing on the likely state, when found, of the memory module: