Merason Frerot

The frerot takes a minimalist approach in keeping with the Merason motto of Weniger ist mehr or less is more. Rather than using a state-of-the-art delta-sigma chip, the frérot leverages a now nineteen-year-old design. Its designer, Swiss engineer Daniel Frauchiger and founder of both Merason and OEM consultancy Niedal Audio Lab, believes that your ears, not specs, should be the final arbiter, and that the old ways are best even when dealing with digital. His two-piece, mid-priced frérot DAC plus POW1 external power supply is as free of clutter as it is of features. The frérot has two front-panel LED indicators, one for power and another for input lock. The only other fascia feature is a four-position rotary input selector. That's it, Doctor Hicks. No information overload here. Feature-wise, the frérot hews to a late-90s view of digital, supporting 44.1k samples per second on up to 192k or 4 x 48kHz. En français, frérot means kid brother, and the frérot DAC shares an old-school converter with its big brother, the DAC1. Both products employ Burr-Brown's 24-bit PCM1794A monolithic DAC chips, first released in the Digital Dark Ages circa 2003. Each chip is capable of stereo operation but is wired to provide a single channel for an extra 5 decibels of decreased noise floor. The frérot puts a discreet Class A transimpedance amplifier to work to convert the DAC chip's current output to a voltage with enough gain so your power amp is happy. Also serving the goal of better sound, all input signals are galvanically isolated to suppress noise, and the balanced outputs are realized electronically with, as distributor Mark Sossa wrote, four independent channels from the output of the two converter chips to the output of the frérot.

Output: max. 3 V RMS (symmetrical), max. 1.5 V RMS (asymmetrical). Frequency: 20 Hz to 20 kHz +/- 0.2 dB. THD+N: < 0.012 %. SNR: > 120 dB. DAC: 1x BurrBrown 1794A, discrete I/V stage. Output: discrete surface mounting. AC input voltage: 230V AC / 50 - 60 Hz, 30 W. Audio formats: 44.1kHz@16 bit, 44.1kHz@24 bit.,48kHz@16 bit, 48kHz@24 bit, 88.2kHz@24 bit, 96kHz@24 bit, 176.4kHz@24 bit, 192kHz@24 bit. Weight: 8 kg