CYRUS XR - COMING SOON TO AUDIO T SOUTHAMPTON
/In the brief respite between Lockdowns 2 and 3 (remember that?) and just before Christmas (remember that?!) we managed a sneak preview and listen to the new range-topping Cyrus XR products.
Cyrus is a long established brand in store here, going right back to the original Cyrus One and Two in the 1980’s in our previous guise as Hampshire Audio. I’m old enough to remember how distinctive and important these innovative and mould-breaking amplifiers were back in the day, overturning overnight the notion that amplifiers had to be big and macho and adorned with tone controls, equalisers and the like in order to produce real hi-fi performance. The shoebox form factor which evolved into the now classic alloy casework has been Cyrus’s signature for many a decade now.
Speaking of Signature, this was, until recently, the top range of Cyrus separates, that is until XR was announced.
Jason from Cyrus showed and played us the two new integrated amplifiers, i7-XR and i9-XR. We were immediately impressed by the improved finish with the control panel now matching the casework perfectly, the sharper display, solid metal rotary encoder, and the slicker touch sensitive controls replacing clunky switches. The sound quality didn’t disappoint either. Both sounded open and detailed with a sweeter presentation than previous Cyrus amplifiers. Unsurprisingly the i9-XR had substantially more authority and depth, with a lot more power on tap.
We then listened to the top of the range Pre-XR, which replaces the long established DAC XP Signature. It’s a completely new design from the ground up, with much lower noise floor, greater dynamic range and broader bandwidth capable of 32 bit/768k and DSD files. There are five analogue inputs, including MM phono, plus a headphone output, two toslink and two coaxial digital inputs as well as USB. This much higher specification was matched by the tremendous improvement in performance. The Pre-XR effortlessly presented music, intricately unravelling the most complex passages so every individual strand can be followed whilst remaining a coherent whole. It really is outstanding.
We were so impressed that we have ordered all five of the first release of Cyrus XR products:
Cyrus i7-XR 52W integrated amplifier
Cyrus i9-XR 91W integrated amplifier
Cyrus CDI-XR integrated CD player
Cyrus CDT-XR digital CD transport
Cyrus Pre-XR digital/analogue preamplifier
We can’t wait for them to arrive! So good to have something positive to look forward to during lockdown!
As soon as our XR demo stock arrives we will run it in and put it through its paces, so check in again soon for an update.
Alan and Wayne - Audio T Southampton
P.S. As if that isn’t exciting enough, coming later will be the all new high end PSU-XR power supply, which will massively enhance the performance of any Cyrus XR product!
Cyrus can be found at the following Audio-T stores
