Cyrus CDi-XR

Cyrus has dominated the premium CD player market for more years than we care to remember. Its long-running and still current CDi model has won the premium CD player category in our Awards every year since its introduction in late 2013. That level of success says as much about the CDi’s quality as it does the state of competition in the CD player market.

More recently Cyrus announced the new XR range, which sits above the existing Classic series that the CDi is part of. The XR range is made up of two integrated amplifiers, a preamplifier, an outboard power supply, and two CD- playing products – a dedicated transport and the CDi-XR player on test here.

Distinctive appearance

The CDi-XR looks a little too familiar for an all-new product, predominantly owing to the fact that it comes in the same half-width casing the brand has been using for decades. There’s nothing wrong with this half-width casing, mind. It gives a solid, low-resonance foundation for the electronics to work from and lends Cyrus’s products a distinctive appearance that sets them apart from the competition.

Dig deeper and you will also find that the brand’s much–lauded slot-loading transport mechanism has been carried over too. This has long been another point of distinction between Cyrus’s players and those from rivals. It was originally introduced in late 2007 and represented a major investment from the brand. The idea was to assemble a dedicated transport kit and write proprietary control software for it that optimised its ability to extract the maximum amount of data first time rather than having to do re-reads. Cyrus claimed a 20 per cent improvement in reading errors at the time compared with the off-the-shelf units it used previously.