Cyrus has a singular approach to casework design, new products are always shoe-horned into the cast aluminium half-width boxes that have become the company's signature.

The new Cyrus CD Xt SE transport is distinguished by the addition of two letters printed in white on silver on its lower lip, which must be cause for confusion from time to time.

Having said that this particular unit is easily differentiated from its predecessor, at least by virtue of a slot – rather than drawer-loading mechanism.

Design revision

This move has occurred across the Cyrus range and is related to the reason for the revision of the transport itself, which is indicated by the SE suffix. This stands not for special edition, as is usually the case, but for servo evolution, Cyrus MD Peter Bartlett, claims that his company's development of its own servo software makes it unique in the hi-fi universe.

A servomechanism, to give it its full title, is a device which (in a CD player) controls the motors which operate the laser mechanism that reads the disc. Cyrus has the advantage of employing Jonathan Green, an engineer who used to work in Philips' optical engineering department and thus a chap with a deep knowledge of how optical disc systems work.

Along with the Cyrus engineering team he designed the servo software that allows all current Cyrus players to operate in a fashion that is dedicated to getting the most information from the disc with the minimum of data corruption.

This involves spinning the disc at 1x speed and operating the drive for maximum data retrieval with less reliance on error correction and improved laser control accuracy. The claimed result is up to five times fewer data errors, better signal-to-noise ratios and improved jitter levels.

Operation issues

Operationally the CD Xt SE is pretty straightforward, there's the new disc loading system to master, but that's really just a matter of avoiding putting fingers on the playing surface.

We had a few glitches with discs not playing properly, but these were overcome by ejecting and re-inserting. The remote handset is designed to control anything in the Cyrus range and as that range includes a multichannel processor, there are quite a few legends and buttons that are not relevant to CD playback.

Fortunately, the operational keys are bright green and, therefore, easy to find but things like the next track take a bit of scanning for.

Oversampling

The DAC XP is a 24-bit/192kHz oversampling digital to analogue converter and analogue preamp combined. It has six digital and two analogue inputs alongside two pairs of outputs in both balanced and single-ended form. It is a fully balanced, dual-mono preamplifier with input naming from a given list and alternative display options.

On the digital side, the DAC XP has an intelligent receiver that treats signals according to their quality. Thus it re-clocks high-quality signals using a close tolerance circuit with triple quartz reference, but when it receives a low accuracy signal from a PC, for instance, it relaxes the re-clocking precision to ensure reliable signal recovery. As it stands, however, there is no USB input which would be useful for PC sources.

Rare clarity

The sound of this pairing has clearly changed since its first incarnation. Audio memory can be a fickle thing, but on this occasion we are pretty certain that the goalposts have moved.