This is another terrific sounding player from Cyrus. The CD 8 SE is as capable a player as we’ve heard at this price level

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If you’re a regular reader you can’t fail to have noticed we’ve been mightily impressed by Cyrus’s new SE range of CD players.

The entry-level £800 CD 6 SE is good enough to batter anything we’ve heard below the grand, and the upmarket transport and DAC will worry all but the very best of the high-end.

So, where does the CD 8 SE come in?This player could quite easily have fallen between two stools, but it doesn’t. Cyrus has judged the performance (and price) perfectly.

Given a couple of days to run-in the CD 8 SE delivers everything its little brother does and then some. When it comes to organisation, timing, and punch we ‘d find the two hard to separate.

Adds increased resolution
No surprise really, considering the standards they set in these areas are just about as good as CD players get. The CD 8 SE then adds increased resolution, greater subtlety and authority into the mix, so pulling ahead of its cheaper sibling.

It makes the £300 price premium easy to justify, particularly when you consider the 8 can be upgraded by connecting Cyrus’s £450 PSX-R outboard power supply and the 6 can’t.

The junior player has to be upgraded to 8 status first, which can be done by the factory for little more than the difference in price between the machines. That’s the great thing about Cyrus components: they’re rarely dead-end products and usually have some sort of upgradeability built-in.

With or without the power supply the CD 8 SE is a supremely musical machine. It’s as happy delivering the thunder of Holst’s Mars as it is rocking out to Nirvana.

Direct emotional connection
Judged in purely hi-fi terms it’s astonishingly hard to criticise and musically that translates to a machine that gets straight to the emotional heart of the music. You’re never left in any doubt as to what the singer or composer want you to feel. That kind of direct emotional connection is very rare indeed, even at far higher price points than this.

Provided the rest of your system is good enough we have no doubt the CD 8 SE will thrill and engross better than any other machine at this price level.

As with all top class equipment a bit of pampering doesn’t go amiss. A good dedicated equipment rack is essential, as are decent interconnects – Cyrus’s own work well. This player also responds well to specialist mains cables, and in our system Clearer Audio’s Copper-line (£95) worked a treat, improving refinement and dynamics notably.

The sonic advance of Cyrus’s SE range over the company’s last generation of players is down to the new transport including the slot loader mechanism and control software. The rest of the machine, DACs, power supply and casework remain pretty much unchanged.

This new transport system is fussier about disc quality than most rivals. Occasionally certain discs, usually CD-Rs, may not load first time, though in most cases reloading the disc does the trick. Be a little patient and all will be fine.

That said, we can’t over-emphasise just how good this player sounds. If we had this kind of budget the CD 8 SE is where our money would go. You can’t get a higher recommendation than that. Back to top