Cyrus 40 CD

Cyrus hits another home run with its premium CD player

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CD player £2995 whf.cm/Cyrus_40_CD

Cyrus Audio's 40 Series of products has been a rebirth for the brand. The 40-year-old British company's 40 ST streamer and 40 AMP integrated amplifier have impressed us hugely with their immensely capable and entertaining performance, all while retaining core hallmarks of Cyrus's identity and giving a fresh design outlook, too.

Can the Cyrus 40 CD player continue this run of success? You can already see from the star rating that it has, but, like its siblings, it's not without some quirks.

Design integrity

It will surprise no one that the Cyrus 40 CD follows the same design blueprint - and footprint - as its 40 ST and 40 AMP stablemates. The classic half-width chassis design that identifies a Cyrus product has been refreshed and modernised successfully. And the brushed anodised aluminium body and glass front panel exude a premium, quality feel befitting the price tag.

In comparison, our trusty old Cyrus CDi - with the grey metal chassis and green display - looks positively Jurassic. But it's not hard to see the familial link between the two, for which we think Cyrus's designers deserve great credit.

The innards of the 40 CD spinner have been designed to achieve the “highest possible performance”. The digital circuitry is based on a 32-bit ESS Sabre ES9039Q2M chip and HyperStream IV Dual DAC technology, while the circuit-board layout has been optimised by the engineering team during the tuning of the DAC to deliver the best sound from this CD player.

As with the streamer and amplifier, there are eight digital filters available in the player's menu. The differences between them are quite subtle, but it's worth auditioning them to see which suits your tastes and partnering system the best. We find that the Minimum Phase or Linear Phase filter options (in Slow Roll-Off modes) are most to our liking during our testing, as they sound most natural with our reference system.