Those who have looked meticulously at the images depicted in the HEM company visit report might have already spotted the third offspring of the Ferrum family after the Statement in Hifi Fidelity-winning HYPSOS power supply and the OOR headphone amplifier: a combination of headphone amplifier and converter named the ERCO. Now a series model made its way to Gröbenzell.

Also their third device enjoys the merits of the Ferrum team’s rather special model name assignment. After the Greek HYPSOS and the Dutch OOR, it’s now time for Esperanto: ERCO - pronounced "ertso" - stands for ore and thus not in connection with the product itelf, as is the case with the OOR, but with the brand name instead. The front view of the ERCO differs from that of the OOR in only two minor details: First, the input selector switch provides access to one unbalanced analog input only, but at the same time enables access to all the digital signals that are available at the USB, coaxial or optical S/PDIF inputs. On the other hand, there is a Pentaconn jack for the balanced signal in addition to the usual 6.3 millimeter headphone jack output here. On the OOR, a four-pin XLR jack takes charge of this - which seems more practical to me. For Ferrum's target group of the ERCO, however, the decision made for the connection type also to be found on many digital audio players and headphones intended for mobile use eventually seems to be the better one. In that respect, Ferrum is similarly future-oriented as with the USB input: The new USB-C variant is used here. It’s nice to see that they have thought of including a USB-A to USB-C cable, which is probably not very common at the moment.

Most of you may know that HEM, Ferrum's parent company, has in the past been responsible for both the manufacturing and a not inconsiderable part of the development of the Mytek components - the brand that has earned an excellent reputation mainly thanks to its digital/analog and analog/digital converters for professional and home applications. When HEM’s boss Marcin Hamerla announced a Ferrum headphone amplifier/converter combo some time ago, I spontaneously thought of a DAC with headphone output. But the ERCO is anything but that: Not only at first glance it looks like a headphone amplifier hosting an additional converter. In its development, Ferrum took the successful OOR as a starting point and looked for ways to integrate a digital section. Adopting the OOR's circuitry one-to-one quickly proved to be impossible for both space and cost reasons, as Marcin Hamerla revealed. In the end, his engineering team developed an integrated circuit-based output stage that provides slightly less power than the OOR's discrete design, but without seriously sacrificing its sonic benefits. The connectivity and the possibility to vary the sound according to one's own taste by means of different filters or upsampling, as it is the case with a Mytek Brooklyn DAC+, are not to be found in the ERCO: Its place is not in the studio, but near a computer on the desktop or in a home hi-fi system.