Fosi Audio has made a CD player. It is 102 mm square, 29 mm thick, runs on a battery and costs 99.99 dollars. You can put it in a jacket pocket.
That price is the interesting part for us. Of the 297 stereo amplifiers we list, only six have a CD drive built in, and the cheapest of them is 650 dollars.
Fosi Audio DISC Nano portable CD player in white
Quick facts
- 99.99 dollars, in white or black. A bundle with Fosi IM4 earphones is 199.99.
- Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC, 3.5 mm and balanced 4.4 mm headphone outputs, about 86 mW per channel into 32 ohms.
- Optical digital out, so it can feed an amplifier or a DAC as a CD transport.
- Bluetooth out, an 800 mAh battery charged over USB-C, anti-shock buffering, 210 g.
- Burned CD-R discs are only "partially readable". That is the main catch, and it is covered below.
What a CD drive costs everywhere else
I checked what a CD drive costs in the rest of our database. Six of our 297 stereo amplifiers have one: the Marantz M-CR612 at 650 dollars, the Denon CEOL RCD-N12 at 699, the new Marantz MCR-60n at 1,000, the Technics SA-C600 at 1,300, the Audiolab Omnia at 2,300 and the Naim Uniti Star at 5,699.
What a built in CD drive costs in the amplifiers we list
It is not a fair comparison, and I will say why straight away. Those six are complete systems. They have an amplifier, speaker terminals and usually a streamer. The Fosi only plays the disc. You still need headphones, powered speakers or an amplifier on the other end.
But it does show where CD has gone. Earlier this month we counted how rare a CD drive has become in amplifiers. The disc has not disappeared. It has split in two: a 1,000 dollar Marantz on a shelf, and a 100 dollar Fosi in a pocket. Both went on sale in the same week of September.
What is inside
The DISC Nano plays with half of the disc exposed
The disc spins half exposed, under a clear lid, and a clip holds it in place. It looks good, and it is also the reason the player is so small.
The DAC is a Cirrus Logic CS43198. Fosi quote a signal to noise ratio of 100 dB or better, distortion under 0.0009 percent and a noise floor of 3 microvolts or less. There are two headphone outputs. The 3.5 mm one doubles as an optical output, and the 4.4 mm one is balanced. Fosi say it suits headphones from 16 to 300 ohms.
For travel there is electronic anti-shock buffering and an error correction mode for scratched discs. The back is magnetic and works with MagSafe mounts. It does not charge your phone. The battery is 800 mAh and charges over USB-C.
Using it with a speaker system
This is where the optical output matters. Plug it into an amplifier with an optical input and the Fosi becomes a CD transport, with the amplifier's own DAC doing the conversion.
Most amplifiers can take it that way. 170 of the 297 stereo amplifiers we list have an optical input. Fosi's own MC331 at 130 dollars and MC351 at 190 both have one, so a complete Fosi CD system starts at about 230 dollars.
Powered speakers are different. Only 16 of the 132 powered speakers we list take optical. With the rest you would use Bluetooth or a 3.5 mm analogue cable.
The DISC Nano sending CD audio to wireless earbuds over Bluetooth
The weak points
Burned CDs. Fosi list CD-R and CD-RW as "partially readable, original discs recommended". If a large part of your collection is discs you burned yourself, this could be a real problem, and you should test it before the return window closes. Fosi offer 30 days.
No battery life figure. Fosi give the battery size, 800 mAh, but not how many hours it plays. A portable player needs that number.
No Bluetooth detail. There is no Bluetooth version and no codec list. For a product that makes a point of its DAC and noise floor, that is an odd thing to leave out. Assume nothing better than the basic codec until Fosi says otherwise.
Two power figures. The product page says 90 mW in the text and 86 mW per channel into 32 ohms in the specification table. The difference is small, but the table figure is the one to trust.
And the exposed disc is a matter of taste. It looks good on a desk. In a bag, you will want to close the lid every time.
What comes in the DISC Nano box
Would you buy a CD player in 2026, and would it go in your pocket or next to your amplifier?