Great CD Player with Crisis of Identity Fosi Merak In Depth Review (vs. FiiO, Shanling)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK5DAi0Wk4I

Here is a particular conversation that happens whenever Fosi Audio releases something new, and it goes roughly like this: "It can't be that good for the money. Can it?" For nearly a decade now, the answer has been "yes, mostly," and that "mostly" has been doing an extraordinary amount of work in carrying the brand from a Shenzhen Class D amplifier specialist into something that looks, at least on paper, like a full hi-fi systems company.

Crisis of Identity

The Merak is the moment the question gets harder. This is Fosi's first CD player, an entry into a category whose customers are largely either dyed-in-the-wool legacy listeners with twenty-year-old Marantz and Cambridge Audio machines they refuse to retire, or — more interestingly — the new wave of younger physical-media converts who bought a FiiO DM13 last year and discovered, quite to their surprise, that they liked it. Fosi has historically catered to neither group particularly well. Their bread and butter has been amplification and DACs aimed at desktop headphone users who want measurable performance and don't want to spend a thousand euros to get it.

So the Merak is, in a real sense, Fosi trying on a new identity. And the most interesting thing about it — the thing nobody quite says out loud in the comments sections — is that it largely works, but only if you're willing to accept what Fosi has actually built rather than what their marketing keeps half-suggesting. Because this is not a portable CD player. It is not a hi-fi-rack centerpiece. It is, very specifically, a compact desktop disc spinner with ambitions slightly larger than its chassis, and the gap between those ambitions and the execution is where this review wants to live.

Merak just has a crisis of identity, which will be covered more down the line. It markets itself as a portable device, which is not a lie — it is a small, lightweight box — but it is not truly portable. Even though it looks identical to all the other portable CD players. But even as a desktop machine, some decisions here are baffling, like having only a 3.5 mm output and no 4.4 mm output. That is so strange, but the strangest decision is the lack of RCA out. Like every desktop CD player, the most usual and most common connection is RCA, and here there is none? It is like they started building a truly portable device, but somewhere down the line they changed plans, making it truly a device that does not know its identity. So if you have only a power amp and no DAC, tough luck using it in your hi-fi system chain.

Build Quality, Specs, Features

Open the box and the first impression is — and I mean this as a genuine compliment — small. Compact in a way that photos do not communicate. The Merak's footprint sits closer to a thick paperback book than to anything you'd recognize as a traditional CD player, and the silver sandblasted aluminum chassis has the kind of even, matte finish that you'd expect from a product costing two or three times the price. The cabinet has enough mass to feel intentional in the hand without being heavy, which for a desktop-stationary device is roughly the correct calibration. It is not, however, a tank, and you can rap the top with a knuckle and hear that the panels are thinner than the aesthetic suggests. For something destined to live on a desk and never move again, this is fine. For a product Fosi keeps hinting could go elsewhere, it's worth noting.

And honestly, the device looks far more premium than it is, and the buttons are a great testament to that, feeling a bit wobbly. As I said, if you plan to use this only on a desktop with the remote, it is not a big deal, but if you plan to carry it with you all the time, it is a 140-dollar machine like it says — do not expect something superbly built.

The signal chain inside is where things start to get genuinely interesting. The Merak is built around a Cirrus Logic CS43131 paired with a Texas Instruments TPA6120, with an SC6137D handling the transport and control logic. This is not a budget-tier parts selection — the CS43131 is the same chip you find in dongles costing $90–$150 on its own, and the TPA6120 is a workhorse high-current op-amp that turns up in respected desktop headphone amps well above the Merak's price point.

The headphone output delivers a quoted 210 mW per channel into 32 ohms, with a specified load range of 16 to 300 ohms. This is not enough to bully high-impedance, low-sensitivity planars into proper behavior — your LCD-X is not happy on this — but it is more than enough for the HD600 family, every sub-50-ohm dynamic on the market, and most modern planars at reasonable listening levels. The line output sits at the standard 2 Vrms.

Problems

The connectivity layout is, frankly, where Fosi's compromises start to show their teeth.

You get a 3.5 mm headphone output on the front, a 3.5 mm line output on the rear, an optical (Toslink) digital output that can carry bit-perfect 16/44.1 to an external DAC, a USB-A port for direct file playback or CD ripping to USB storage, and a 12 V trigger. Power is via USB-C at 5 V / 2 A, and no power supply is included — Fosi assumes you have a USB-C wall wart, which in 2026 is a reasonable assumption but still feels like a corner cut.

There are two things conspicuously absent from this list, which I already spoke about, and both are worth pressing on.

First, there is no balanced headphone output. Given the chipset's technical capability and the fact that Fosi has aimed this product squarely at headphone listeners on a desk, the omission of a 4.4 mm pentaconn output is genuinely puzzling. The TPA6120 architecture lends itself naturally to a balanced topology, and at the price point this would be a defining feature, not a stretch. Its absence reads, to me, less as a thoughtful product decision and more as a checkbox they forgot to tick.

Second, there is no RCA line output, only a 3.5 mm jack. For desktop use with headphone amplifiers and active monitors this is fine — most desktop-oriented gear is happy with a 3.5 mm-to-RCA cable. But the moment you want to integrate the Merak with anything resembling a separates-based hi-fi system, you are already losing a small amount of perceived quality before any audio has played, because you're plugging your "audiophile CD source" into your integrated amp with what looks, for all the world, like a phone cable.

And then there is the lid.

The transparent top-loading lid is, in concept, the Merak's most charming feature. Watching a disc spin remains one of the small visual pleasures of physical media, and Fosi was right to lean into it. The execution, however, is acrylic, and that's a problem I genuinely don't understand. Acrylic scratches under the lightest pressure, attracts static charge that pulls dust toward itself with depressing reliability, and hazes with age in ways that glass simply does not. For a stationary desktop device with no good reason to ever be carried anywhere, glass would have been the correct choice. It would have added weight, which the Merak needs. It would have added cost, which the product can absorb at this price tier. And it would have transformed the centerpiece visual feature from a slightly precious novelty into a genuinely premium one. This is, by some distance, the easiest critique to level at the Merak, and the one most likely to be addressed in a Mk II.

The volume control is a sliding fader on the right side of the chassis — I like the look. In use it works, but the resistance is light enough that fine adjustment requires more concentration than a rotary encoder would, and the visual feedback on the small OLED display lags slightly behind the slider position in a way that takes some acclimation. I like the boldness of the design decision. I am not yet convinced it serves the user better than a knob.

The feature set elsewhere is genuinely strong. Gapless playback works correctly from the first power-on, which puts the Merak ahead of several considerably more expensive competitors that have shipped without it. The CD transport is fast-loading and quiet, with a 60-second electronic shock protection buffer that you will likely never need on a desktop but which suggests Fosi has built the player around a reasonably mature servo platform.

Sound Quality

Here is the part of the review where I tell you what the Merak sounds like, and here is also the part where I have to acknowledge that what the Merak sounds like is not very much. That is, in the context of a CD-era device built around a modern delta-sigma DAC, an exceedingly high compliment.

The presentation is neutral. Not the marketing-pamphlet "reference neutral" that often means lean, dry, and slightly clinical, but something closer to actually transparent — a presentation that puts no obvious thumbprint on the recording and lets you hear the production decisions on the disc with unusual clarity. Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the 25th anniversary edition, not the heavily compressed reissue) sounds like a room with three musicians in it, which is exactly the thing the recording is famous for, and the bass on "Solar" has the right combination of woody resonance and pizzicato attack rather than the slightly bloated bottom-end you sometimes get when a budget DAC tries to flatter a 1961 recording.

The CS43131 has a reputation for being a slightly polite chip — less aggressive in the upper midrange than the ES9038 family, less analytically forensic than the AKM 4499, more relaxed than either. The TPA6120 has the opposite reputation: clean, fast, and occasionally a bit forward in the upper registers if the implementation isn't careful. The two together, as Fosi has implemented them here, land in an interesting middle ground. There is plenty of detail — the high-harmonic shimmer on a well-mastered guitar track resolves cleanly, transients have the bite they should — but there's no glassy, etched edge to the top end, and no obvious effort to add warmth lower down to compensate for nothing.

Squarepusher on the Merak surprised me. The album's notorious low-end on tracks like "Tundra" is the kind of thing that exposes weak amplification immediately, and while the Merak's 210 mW into 32 Ω is not a torrent of current, it is enough to keep the sub-bass on this kind of material textured and controlled rather than soft. You wouldn't choose the Merak as your endgame source for bass-heavy music, but it doesn't fall apart, which is more than I can say for a number of dongles using the same DAC chip in less ambitious implementations.

Acoustic and chamber material is where I would expect this player to shine, and the reports suggest it does. Vocal-forward jazz, solo piano, classical small-ensemble work — anything where you want a slightly warm-leaning, naturally balanced midrange with no hardness anywhere — sits very comfortably with this signal chain. Anything by Red House Painters fingerpicking through the Merak into a HD600 is a pairing I would happily put on for an evening without feeling I'd settled for anything.

The current portable-and-desktop CD player landscape is more interesting than it has been at any point in the last fifteen years, and the Merak has to be understood against that backdrop rather than against the legacy hi-fi market it doesn't really compete with.

vs. FiiO DM13

Against the FiiO DM13 (≈$150): This is the most natural comparison, and the one Fosi clearly has in mind. The DM13 is portable, the Merak is not — which means the DM13 has a battery and the Merak doesn't, and the DM13 has a balanced 4.4 mm output where the Merak doesn't, and the DM13 has aptX HD Bluetooth where the Merak doesn't. The FiiO uses dual CS43198 chips where the Merak uses a single CS43131. On feature count alone, the DM13 wins this fight on paper. What it doesn't win is the desktop case. The Merak's chassis sits more naturally on a desk, the OLED is more useful at typical desk-viewing angles, the volume slider (whatever its flaws) is easier than fishing the DM13 off your desk to access its controls, and the disc-handling experience is more satisfying. If you genuinely need a portable, buy the FiiO. If your CD player will live next to your monitor and never move, the Merak is the better-thought-through product.

vs. FiiO DM15 R2R

Against the FiiO DM15 R2R (≈$270): A different conversation entirely. The DM15 has a glass lid, a balanced 4.4 mm output, an R2R DAC that sounds genuinely different (warmer, slightly softer-edged) from any delta-sigma implementation, including the Merak's, and battery operation. It costs nearly double. The DM15 is the more complete enthusiast product, and if your budget tolerates the additional outlay you should probably stretch for it. But — and this is important — the DM15's sound is a flavor in a way the Merak's isn't. The R2R presentation is not strictly more accurate, and a meaningful share of listeners will prefer the Merak's cleaner, more neutral delta-sigma rendering. This is a tone-and-philosophy choice as much as a budget one.

VS. Shanling EC Zero AKM

VS. Merak MKII

The honest summary is this: in the sub-$200 desktop CD player category, the Merak doesn't really have a direct competitor. The FiiO DM13 is portable-first. The Shanlings are priced higher. The vintage market exists but comes with maintenance risk, no warranty, and no modern outputs. The Merak has staked out an interesting and largely uncontested patch of territory, and the only people who can really hurt it are Fosi themselves, by releasing a Merak Mk II with a glass lid and a balanced output and charging $179.99 for it.

Synergy and Pairing

The Merak rewards specific kinds of system thinking, and punishes others.

Best-case use 1: Compact desktop headphone listening, warm-leaning headphones. The HD600/650 family, the Sennheiser HD8XX in its more forgiving moments, the HiFiMAN Sundara at moderate listening levels, anything from Audeze's open-back lineup that's not too power-hungry. The Merak's clean, slightly relaxed top end pairs naturally with these headphones' tunings, and the 210 mW output is sufficient for sane listening volumes on everything except the most insensitive planars.

Best-case use 2: Optical out to a serious external DAC. This is, frankly, where the Merak's price-to-performance gets genuinely silly. As a $140 stationary CD transport feeding a $500 DAC, it's a remarkable little machine. The transport is fast, quiet, and reliable; the optical output is bit-perfect and well-clocked; and the form factor is desk-friendly in a way that no full-size legacy transport is. If your bigger system already has a DAC you trust, the Merak is the cleanest path to adding CD playback that I'm aware of at this price.

Best-case use 3: Modest desktop integrated system with active monitors. The Merak's 3.5 mm line out into a pair of powered monitors (the JBL 305P MkII, the Adam T5V, the Genelec 8010) builds a complete desktop hi-fi for under $700 that handles physical media better than virtually any all-in-one streaming solution at twice the price.

Where I'd be more cautious: Pairing the Merak's headphone output with already-bright headphones — the Beyerdynamic DT-series in any form, particularly the 880/990 — is the one configuration that gave me pause. The TPA6120 is not a soft-sounding amp, and bright transducers can push the upper midrange into territory that fatigues. With these headphones, use the line out into a warmer external amp, or pick a different headphone.

Where I'd outright avoid it: As a primary source into a serious separates rack with a $2,000+ DAC. The Merak's transport will not embarrass itself in this context, but it also won't reveal what the rest of the chain can do. The optical output is clean, but the chassis isolation and the power supply implementation are not at the level required to compete with dedicated transports designed for that role. Right tool, wrong job.

The bundle pairing Fosi has been pushing — the Merak with their own IM4 IEMs — is a perfectly reasonable starter package and probably the right entry-level recommendation for a customer who wants to buy one box and be done. But it's not where the Merak's interesting potential lives. The interesting potential lives in stacking it carefully with the rest of a thoughtfully chosen desktop system.

Conclusion

The Merak is a CD player that I want to like more than I do. It is $140 for a genuinely compelling CD player.

What Fosi has gotten right is the engineering hierarchy. They identified that the chipset is the limiting factor at this price point, and they paid for genuinely good silicon. They identified that gapless playback is non-negotiable in 2026, and they delivered it from day one. They identified that the rest of the user experience — disc loading, transport speed, display legibility, remote responsiveness — has to feel polished, and it does. The technical core of this product is genuinely well-executed and genuinely overdelivers against the asking price.

But at $140, in this specific category, for this specific use case — a compact, neutral, technically competent desktop disc spinner with a real DAC, a usable headphone output, a clean optical out, and gapless playback — Fosi has produced something that's genuinely good. Not in spite of its price. Because of it. There is a lot to love about it, and on a sonic-only playing field, the Merak is the real deal.

A Merak Mk II with a glass lid, a balanced output, and a properly damped chassis would be one of the most interesting sub-$200 products in audio. I hope someone at Fosi reads this. I suspect they already know."

Final Score: 7/10

Learn more at official website:

https://tinyurl.com/y7jjt59a

Pros

• Excellent value for money at $140

• Neutral, transparent, and highly competent sound quality

• Good DAC and amplifier implementation (CS43131 + TPA6120)

• Gapless playback works flawlessly

• Fast and quiet CD transport

• Bit-perfect optical output for external DACs

• Compact, desk-friendly form factor

• Attractive premium-looking aluminum chassis

• Surprisingly capable headphone output for most headphones

• OLED display is clear and easy to read

• Remote control works well

• Great as an affordable CD transport in a desktop system

• Easy integration with powered speakers and desktop audio setups

Cons

• Unclear product identity (neither truly portable nor fully desktop-focused)

• No 4.4mm balanced headphone output

• No RCA line outputs

• Acrylic lid scratches easily and attracts dust

• Build quality feels less premium than appearance suggests

• Buttons feel somewhat loose and wobbly

• Limited connectivity compared to key competitors

• Single-ended 3.5mm outputs feel restrictive for hi-fi integration

• Not powerful enough for demanding planar headphones

• Chassis isolation and power implementation limit its appeal as a serious high-end transport