Rocky Rococo
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Fosi Audio is recognized for producing high-performance, budget-friendly compact HiFi audio gear, particularly Class D amplifiers, DACs, and preamplifiers. Known for offering significant value, their products—like the V3 and ZA3 amplifiers—are highly regarded for delivering excellent sound and appealing to a wide range of audio buyers.
Fosi is now branching out to offer audio signal sources, such as the S3 streamer and the newly introduced Merak CD player. Fosi kindly provided the unit I tested in return for my unbiased review. The Merak is a very simple single disk player. At 15 cm (6 inches) square and 2.7 cm (just over 1 inch) it is very similar in size to the original Sony Discman for those of you with long memories, and Fosi refers to it as “portable” but while it has a built in headphone amplifier it lacks an internal battery. Similarly to the Diskman, there’s no sliding CD tray, instead you open the player’s lid to insert the CD. The lid has a transparent window which allows you to view the CD. The player has an aluminum finish that is attractive and resists fingerprints well.
The Merak comes in a nicely packaged box with the CD drive, a USB A to USB C cable, an IR remote control, and the product manual.
Note that no power supply is provided, you’ll need to supply a 5 V USB supply capable of 2 A. I tried several typical USB supply cubes rated near that power with no problem. There’s also no cable for either the line level or the optical outputs.
The front panel of the Merak has the following features:
The Merak has a 37 mm by 17 mm (1.5 inch by 0.7 inch) OLED display screen on the front which shows the CD player’s current playback and output status. There are 7 individual indicators:
The indicators are clear and distinct but limited in size, most people will need to be within arm’s length to be able to see them.
The included remote is 14 cm by 4 cm (5 ½ inch by 1 ½ inch) and has buttons for all the front panel functions. It requires 2 AA batteries, which are not included. All of the player’s functions can be accessed via the remote. Interestingly, the remote has 2 buttons labelled “N/A” indicating that this same physical remote was used on other products.
The manual provides a complete set of specifications:
The audio performance specifications are excellent:
Another feature of the Merak is that it can rip CDs to a thumb drive plugged into the back though this feature does have some limitations. First, it rips to .wav files which are simply numbered consecutively. There’s no way for the Merak to connect to a CD database to figure out what CD is being ripped. Also, the Merak only runs at 1X speed which means that the entire CD has to be played at normal speed. If you have more than a few CDs to rip, buying a USB CD player would be much faster. Also, the Merak won’t connect to a PC or laptop via USB so it can’t play through your PC.
I began testing the Merak by hooking it up to my system which consists of an NAD M33 integrated amplifier driving Magneplanar MG3.7i speakers. My initial tests were using the optical output, mainly because it was easier to get to than the unbalanced RCA connection on the M33. The Merak was simple to operate, you just lift the lid, place the CD inside, close the lid and hit play using either the front panel controls or the remote. The Merak is very quiet in operation, you can just barely hear the CD rotating if you bring your ear right up to it. From my normal listening position there was no noise at all.
My current CD player is a Pioneer Elite BPD-05FD, an older model with excellent specifications. I spent some time listening to a variety of CDs – rock, classical, and jazz, and I could not hear any difference between the sound of the two players when utilizing the optical outputs. This means that neither of the internal DACs of the two players was being utilized, in this case the players were simply transports.
In order to test the DAC and line outputs of the Merak, I first tried to measure the performance using a test CD with very pure sine waves and square waves. The sine wave distortion of my test setup is about 0.01% so I didn’t get any readings above the instrument residual. I was able to measure the square wave response, here it is at 1 kHz:
You can see the ringing of the internal DAC’s output filters which is sinusoidal at about 22 kHz. The 100 Hz square wave shows the ringing dies out cleanly after roughly 1 ms. The very slight tilt to the waveform indicates that the DAC’s low frequency response extends well below the audible range. My measurements showed that the frequency response was flat within 0.1 dB from about 6 Hz to 20 kHz.
In order to evaluate the sound from the DAC output I enlisted the aid of two audiophile friends to listen on the most revealing setup I have ever heard, a $40K Atmos 7.3.4 Magneplanar system. We auditioned the Merak DAC and optical outputs versus the same outputs from an Oppo UDP-205 CD player. We couldn’t hear any difference between the Oppo and the Merak when auditioning via the optical outputs. When using the DAC outputs, the Merak sounded slightly less clear and open compared to the Oppo, especially on female vocals. The difference was subtle, and it didn’t prevent us from enjoying the music but it was audible.
Interestingly, my friend was evaluating the Fosi Audio S3 streamer at the same time. As an experiment, we connected the Merak’s optical output to the S3’s optical input, then listened to the S3’s DAC outputs versus the Oppo. This test showed that the S3 has a superior DAC because it sounded identical to the Oppo’s DAC output. Square wave testing of the S3’s DAC shows better control of the ringing which indicates superior filter performance.
This means that if you want to have an “executive stack” with the Merak playing CDs via its optical output into the S3, and from there into a power amp like the ZA3 integrated amplifier or a pair of Fosi’s V3s you could have a very creditable system for under $1,000 before you buy speakers.
In summary, the Merak is a very good CD player and at the price of $139.95, it’s an excellent value even taking into account the need for a user supplied USB supply and cables. Competing single disk transports typically start at $400. I suspect a big portion of the cost savings Fosi is able to pass along is due to the simple mechanism contrasted to the sliding drawers of the competition. While the lid on the Merak means you can’t stack other equipment on top of it, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether that’s a significant limitation.
Fosi is now branching out to offer audio signal sources, such as the S3 streamer and the newly introduced Merak CD player. Fosi kindly provided the unit I tested in return for my unbiased review. The Merak is a very simple single disk player. At 15 cm (6 inches) square and 2.7 cm (just over 1 inch) it is very similar in size to the original Sony Discman for those of you with long memories, and Fosi refers to it as “portable” but while it has a built in headphone amplifier it lacks an internal battery. Similarly to the Diskman, there’s no sliding CD tray, instead you open the player’s lid to insert the CD. The lid has a transparent window which allows you to view the CD. The player has an aluminum finish that is attractive and resists fingerprints well.
The Merak comes in a nicely packaged box with the CD drive, a USB A to USB C cable, an IR remote control, and the product manual.
Note that no power supply is provided, you’ll need to supply a 5 V USB supply capable of 2 A. I tried several typical USB supply cubes rated near that power with no problem. There’s also no cable for either the line level or the optical outputs.
The front panel of the Merak has the following features:
The Merak has a 37 mm by 17 mm (1.5 inch by 0.7 inch) OLED display screen on the front which shows the CD player’s current playback and output status. There are 7 individual indicators:
The indicators are clear and distinct but limited in size, most people will need to be within arm’s length to be able to see them.
The included remote is 14 cm by 4 cm (5 ½ inch by 1 ½ inch) and has buttons for all the front panel functions. It requires 2 AA batteries, which are not included. All of the player’s functions can be accessed via the remote. Interestingly, the remote has 2 buttons labelled “N/A” indicating that this same physical remote was used on other products.
The manual provides a complete set of specifications:
The audio performance specifications are excellent:
Another feature of the Merak is that it can rip CDs to a thumb drive plugged into the back though this feature does have some limitations. First, it rips to .wav files which are simply numbered consecutively. There’s no way for the Merak to connect to a CD database to figure out what CD is being ripped. Also, the Merak only runs at 1X speed which means that the entire CD has to be played at normal speed. If you have more than a few CDs to rip, buying a USB CD player would be much faster. Also, the Merak won’t connect to a PC or laptop via USB so it can’t play through your PC.
I began testing the Merak by hooking it up to my system which consists of an NAD M33 integrated amplifier driving Magneplanar MG3.7i speakers. My initial tests were using the optical output, mainly because it was easier to get to than the unbalanced RCA connection on the M33. The Merak was simple to operate, you just lift the lid, place the CD inside, close the lid and hit play using either the front panel controls or the remote. The Merak is very quiet in operation, you can just barely hear the CD rotating if you bring your ear right up to it. From my normal listening position there was no noise at all.
My current CD player is a Pioneer Elite BPD-05FD, an older model with excellent specifications. I spent some time listening to a variety of CDs – rock, classical, and jazz, and I could not hear any difference between the sound of the two players when utilizing the optical outputs. This means that neither of the internal DACs of the two players was being utilized, in this case the players were simply transports.
In order to test the DAC and line outputs of the Merak, I first tried to measure the performance using a test CD with very pure sine waves and square waves. The sine wave distortion of my test setup is about 0.01% so I didn’t get any readings above the instrument residual. I was able to measure the square wave response, here it is at 1 kHz:
You can see the ringing of the internal DAC’s output filters which is sinusoidal at about 22 kHz. The 100 Hz square wave shows the ringing dies out cleanly after roughly 1 ms. The very slight tilt to the waveform indicates that the DAC’s low frequency response extends well below the audible range. My measurements showed that the frequency response was flat within 0.1 dB from about 6 Hz to 20 kHz.
In order to evaluate the sound from the DAC output I enlisted the aid of two audiophile friends to listen on the most revealing setup I have ever heard, a $40K Atmos 7.3.4 Magneplanar system. We auditioned the Merak DAC and optical outputs versus the same outputs from an Oppo UDP-205 CD player. We couldn’t hear any difference between the Oppo and the Merak when auditioning via the optical outputs. When using the DAC outputs, the Merak sounded slightly less clear and open compared to the Oppo, especially on female vocals. The difference was subtle, and it didn’t prevent us from enjoying the music but it was audible.
Interestingly, my friend was evaluating the Fosi Audio S3 streamer at the same time. As an experiment, we connected the Merak’s optical output to the S3’s optical input, then listened to the S3’s DAC outputs versus the Oppo. This test showed that the S3 has a superior DAC because it sounded identical to the Oppo’s DAC output. Square wave testing of the S3’s DAC shows better control of the ringing which indicates superior filter performance.
This means that if you want to have an “executive stack” with the Merak playing CDs via its optical output into the S3, and from there into a power amp like the ZA3 integrated amplifier or a pair of Fosi’s V3s you could have a very creditable system for under $1,000 before you buy speakers.
In summary, the Merak is a very good CD player and at the price of $139.95, it’s an excellent value even taking into account the need for a user supplied USB supply and cables. Competing single disk transports typically start at $400. I suspect a big portion of the cost savings Fosi is able to pass along is due to the simple mechanism contrasted to the sliding drawers of the competition. While the lid on the Merak means you can’t stack other equipment on top of it, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether that’s a significant limitation.
