Okay. I looked it over. Yes, I think the Ferot can definitely be a budget level DAC that sounds really good. Here is why. The Ferot uses an old schoool Burr-Brown 1794 DAC chip. It is extremely easy to engineer a DAC that sounds good with these chips. When using these chips, the DAC normally has two different TCXO clocks for the two primary audio sampling rate multipliers (i.e. 44.1/88.2/172.4 vs 48/96/192). The 1794 dac chip is very forgiving and you don’t have to focus a lot on power supply and I/V stages too much. The 1794 is a two channel DAC chip and DACs will usually only have one 1794 chip for a stereo output.
At $1350 it would be a good "get your feet wet" option. I would definitely recommend getting the $900 Merason linear power supply for this because it is very well designed and uses a 4-pin XLR connection for the power (as opposed to a normal 2.1mm 5.5mm barrel plug). Although, you can still get a lower cost linear power supply if you want (like the Farad Super3).
The Merason Ferot will likely have more resolution than the Border Patrol dac mentioned above, but the Border Patrol will definitely still be more "organic" sounding. You will not have as good "separation of instruments" from the Border Patrol. When there’s a lot of instruments and types of sound going on , the Border Patrol will likely to sound a bit messy and it will be difficult to pull out the individual sound of a guitar in the middle of bass, drums, distortion, screaming vocals, etc.
Some DACS will use the ESS chips. These are generally the most highest resolution and most revealing dac chips. However, it’s incredibly hard to engineer a solution with the ESS that sounds good. If you want the most detailed and revealing DAC, the ESS is the way to go. However, the chip has a different design. It is more like a CPU processor than a traditional dac because it has so many different functions built in. The core in ESS runs at 100Mhz and you need an extremely good 100MHz clock for the timing to be accurate. The ESS chip internally samples different rates using integer math against the 100MHz timing to produce the right pulse speeds (i.e. 44.1kz for cd, 48khz, 96khz, etc.). The power supply for the ESS needs to be extremely smooth and extremely stable. If you look at the LKS MH-DA005 internal pics, you can see that there is a massive main power supply on the bottom using multiple stages to power super-capacitors that act almost like batteries to give the smoothest constant voltage. In addition to that, you will see additional multiple stages of small regulators on the DAC board with tons of polymer caps for filtering the power supply that is fed into the DAC chips.
In addition, the LKS uses two separate ESS9038 dac chips (one for each channel). Each ESS9038 is actually an 8-channel DAC chip. The LKS uses all 8 channel in parallel stacked to produce a single balanced output that is fed into the discrete I/V stage.
That being said, all this costs money and parts, which is why the LKS 005 is $3300.
The basic premise is the more you spend, the better you will get. This will extend up to $5k, $10k, $20k, $50k. You will have a point of diminishing returns where it is just not cost effective for you to spend the additional money for a smaller boost in performance. At the $3-5k level, you are not there yet. But everyone has a different budget. If you really only have $1300 to spend, the Ferot looks like an excellent choice.
