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At $140, the Merak is Fosi Audio’s first foray into the CD player space, and for a company best known for budget amplifiers and DACs, it’s a remarkable debut. It plays discs cleanly, sounds legitimately great, and packs a capable headphone amplifier and high-performing DAC into a compact silver chassis. For the growing crowd of people rediscovering physical media – whether out of nostalgia, audiophile conviction, or simple frustration with streaming’s missing catalog depth – it arrives at exactly the right moment and at exactly the right price. But from the moment you pull it out of the box, one thing becomes obvious: this is not a portable device, no matter what the box says. Once you stop expecting the Merak to do something it was never built for, it becomes one of the more compelling little audio products released this year.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Positioning
The personal CD player renaissance has produced two clear camps: truly portable battery-powered devices you can throw in a bag, and compact desktop transports that live on your desk and do serious audio work. The FiiO DM13 sits firmly in the first camp – it has a built-in battery, runs for hours untethered, and even offers Bluetooth output for wireless headphone use. It’s a proper Discman-era reimagining for the modern listener who wants to commute with their CD collection without streaming it first. The DM13 made that pitch convincingly and found a real audience.
The Merak doesn’t compete with that, even though the price tags sit within arm’s reach of each other, and the box clearly says that it’s portable. There is no battery. The lid doesn’t latch shut for transit. You plug it into a USB-C power adapter (DC 5V/2A, sold separately), set it on a flat surface, and listen. That’s not a flaw in the product – it’s a description Fosi should be making far louder and more plainly than it currently does. Leaning into the desk-bound identity would serve Fosi well here, because the Merak is actually well-suited to a permanent home in a listening setup. Not being portable isn’t a disadvantage for longevity or reliability; a device that never travels never gets dropped, never gets its lens fogged by humidity in a bag, and never has its lid mechanism stressed by being shoved into a backpack pocket. The compromises that portability forces on a product – battery management, latching lids, vibration tolerance – are all absent here, and the Merak is better for it. Fosi just needs to say so.
Design and Build
The Merak is a classic low-profile, horizontal box with a hinged top-loading lid and a small OLED display up front showing track information, playback status, and input selection. It weighs in at a light 436 grams, just under one pound, which feels somewhat at odds with the desk-bound, stay-put experience it’s designed for. The all-metal framing gives it a reasonable first impression, and the silver finish reads as clean and modern on a desk. But spend a few minutes with it and the lighter-feeling panels start to reveal themselves – the chassis picks up vibration more than you’d expect from a device built around a spinning disc mechanism. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s a reminder that “all-metal” and “tank-like” are not the same thing.
The hinged lid holds itself open past about 45 degrees without assistance – a small but satisfying mechanical detail that separates it from cheaper players where you need a free hand to keep the lid up while loading a disc. The sliding volume control along the front face is tactile and appropriately sized, but it lacks the damping and resistance needed for fine-grained adjustments. Getting the volume close to where you want it is easy; landing exactly on it is harder than it should be. For background listening this is a non-issue, but for focused headphone sessions where the difference between 40 and 42 percent volume matters, the imprecision becomes mildly frustrating.
Read also: FiiO DM15 R2R review – The Most Feature-Rich CD Player Out There?
Then there’s the transparent acrylic lid, which is the Merak’s single most disappointing design decision. Watching the disc spin is a charming feature and one of the visual pleasures of top-loading players in general – but the acrylic execution falls well short of what the Merak’s ambitions deserve. Our unit arrived already carrying smudges from the factory, and cleaning attempts only seemed to redistribute the problem rather than resolve it. Acrylic scratches easily, attracts static charge that pulls in dust and particles, and hazes with age in a way that glass simply does not. Given that this player has no reason to ever leave the desk, and given the premium aesthetic Fosi is clearly reaching for, glass would have been the correct call. It would have cost more, it would have added a little weight – both of which would have been improvements – and it would have transformed the visual centrepiece of the device from a liability into a selling point. This is the one area where the Merak’s budget origins show most visibly, and it’s fixable in a second-generation revision.
CD Playback and Features
This is where the Merak genuinely earns its keep and then some. Disc loading is fast, the mechanism is quiet, tracking is stable across a wide range of disc conditions, and across every album tested – including older pressings from the early days of the format and home-burned CD-Rs – playback was consistent and free of the audible errors and skips that cheaper optical mechanisms sometimes produce on imperfect media.
Most importantly, gapless playback works correctly out of the box, no firmware spelunking required. Continuous albums play exactly as intended – uninterrupted, seamless, the way a disc is supposed to sound. This matters more than it might seem to someone who primarily listens to pop albums where every track has a clean start and end. For progressive rock, classical recordings, live albums, ambient music, and anything mixed as a continuous listening experience, gapless support is the difference between the Merak sounding like a proper hi-fi component and sounding like a cheap CD-ROM drive. The Merak passes this test without qualification.
Beyond standard playback, the device functions as a CD ripper, letting you archive discs directly to a USB flash drive in WAV format via one-touch ripping. It supports CDDA, CD-R, and CD-RW formats, reads CD-R discs containing FLAC, WAV, WMA, AAC, and MP3 files, and plays USB drives loaded with MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, APE, and WMA files. The ESP anti-skip buffer stores up to 60 seconds of audio, even though I don’t know why it’s there at all considering the desktop nature of the device. Four playback modes cover single track, single disc, repeat, and random listening, and the lid-open auto-stop protects both the mechanism and whatever is playing. The IR remote handles input and output switching, track navigation, and volume from up to seven meters away – a genuinely useful range that covers most desk-to-couch arrangements without line-of-sight gymnastics. Firmware updates arrive via USB flash drive using files hosted on Fosi’s support page, which means the platform is not static and bugs can be addressed as the product matures in the wild.
Sound Quality
The hardware inside the Merak is the product’s most compelling argument. A CS43131 DAC paired with a TPA6120 headphone amplifier is a signal chain that most $140 devices simply don’t offer. The CS43131 is a well-regarded chip used across significantly more expensive dedicated DACs, and the TPA6120 has a strong reputation for clean, high-current headphone amplification. Together they produce a result that doesn’t sound like a budget product – it sounds like a deliberate, thoughtful piece of audio engineering that happens to cost $140.
The line output achieves a 124dB SNR and a THD+N of just 0.0009% A-weighted – numbers that sit comfortably in conversations about dedicated desktop DACs costing two to three times as much. The 3.5mm headphone output delivers 210mW+210mW into 32 ohms with a THD+N below 0.002%, and that rated output power is sufficient to drive the vast majority of headphones in any reasonable collection without approaching the amplifier’s limits. Dynamic range on both the headphone and line outputs measures at 121dB and 124dB respectively, which is exceptional for the price tier.
Read also: FiiO DM13 review: CD Renaissance Is In Full Swing, And I Am Here For It
In practice, the sound is detailed, clean, and surprisingly open – more spacious than the compact chassis suggests. High-frequency reproduction is clear without glare or hardness at the top end. The midrange sits present and defined without being pushed forward or coloured. Bass is controlled and accurate rather than exaggerated for impact, which suits the CS43131’s character well. The overall presentation is analytical rather than warm, meaning it reports what’s on the disc faithfully rather than flattering it with coloration – which is exactly what you want from a source component. Running the Merak as a pure transport through an external DAC via the optical output pushes performance further, and for anyone already owning a quality outboard DAC, this use case turns the Merak into a serious transport at a frankly difficult-to-argue-with price point.
Connectivity
For $140, the output suite is well chosen. A 3.5mm headphone jack, a line output, and an optical TOSLINK output serve the main use cases cleanly. The USB-A input handles flash drives for file playback and one-touch ripping. The 12V trigger output is an unusually mature inclusion at this price – it allows the Merak to automatically bring compatible amplifiers online and offline in sync with its own power state, which is a feature more associated with rack-mounted separates than compact budget players. For anyone running the Merak as part of a small desktop system with a Fosi amp, this adds a layer of genuine everyday convenience.
What’s absent is a balanced headphone output. Given the CS43131’s technical capability and the Merak’s explicitly stationary, desktop-oriented nature, a 4.4mm pentaconn balanced output would have made a compelling statement to the enthusiast audience that Fosi is clearly courting with these specifications. The single-ended output is clean and powerful enough for real-world use with nearly any headphone, so this omission won’t impact most buyers day-to-day. But it’s a conspicuous gap on a spec sheet this otherwise strong, and it’s worth knowing about before you commit if balanced headphone listening is a priority in your setup.
Verdict
The Fosi Audio Merak is a genuinely impressive first CD player from a company that has spent years proving it understands the value engineering game better than almost anyone else at this price tier. Its disc playback is the most consistent and trouble-free of any player tested – gapless from day one, fast-loading, quiet in operation, and reliable across every disc format and condition thrown at it. Its audio performance through both the headphone and line outputs is exceptional for the money, underpinned by hardware that competes with dedicated components at higher price points. The 12V trigger, the optical output, and the ripping functionality all suggest a product that was designed with real desktop hi-fi use cases in mind, not a product that was designed for a different purpose and shipped with a spec list attached.
The caveats are real, but none of them are fundamental. The acrylic lid is a poor materials choice for a stationary device and arrived less than pristine – glass would transform both the first impression and the long-term ownership story considerably. The chassis is lighter and more resonant than the price and aesthetic imply. The sliding volume control needs more mechanical resistance for precise fine-tuning. There is no balanced headphone output, which stands out on a spec sheet this otherwise technically ambitious. And Fosi genuinely needs to commit to the product’s identity in how it communicates about the Merak – this is a compact desktop CD player, built for a desk, best enjoyed from a desk, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The CD player category needs more products like it.