This is immediately obvious in the quality of high-frequency sounds, such as female voice and percussion, which are unusually well reproduced and have a clarity and depth that is rare. It's also a highly detailed sound that delivers uncanny amounts of low-level information, which means that the soundstage is never less than full size.

The downside to this exposure is that less than sweet or clean recordings tend to reveal their shortcomings. Pianos, for instance, can harden up if a recording has been compressed. This proved to be the case with solo piano on Esbjorn Trio Svensson's Live in Hamburg disc, but when the band got going as a whole, the coherence and solidity of the low end balanced things out nicely, the result being very strong on atmosphere and the low-level cues that help to recreate the excitement of a live event.

The pairing appreciates a good digital interconnect. We started with a somewhat aged Furukawa cable, before moving to a Chord Company Signature which tidies things up appreciably and lets you hear much further into the music.

Crisp precision

It's hard to find anything to directly compare these components to, there are few if any other standalone transports under a grand and DAC/preamps are hardly commonplace. We did, however, have a Russ Andrews HP-1 preamp and DA-1 DAC, which when combined are a bit like the DAC XP, albeit in two boxes and with far fewer features.

Next to these the Cyrus solution offers a big upgrade in resolution thanks to its greater overall transparency. This helps to give the sound its room-filling scale and to fill in the fine detail in voices for instance, that the more affordable Russ Andrews combo struggles to reveal. That said, the treble is easier to live with, probably because it's less revealing.

With a great recording such as Cornelius's Sensuous album, instruments like small bells and acoustic guitar are produced out of thin air with magical realism. And when more elements are introduced to the mix it just gets bigger and better – the Cyrus brings its crisp precision to the whole bandwidth so that the bass is as tight and shapely as you like.

Usefully, this detail resolve does not get in the way of the musical message. In fact, it reinforces it with an excellent grasp of timing that enables easy access to complex rhythms.

Deep bass

Another successful title is The Trentemøller Chronicles, which is a bit like the Orb, but in a contemporary style and without the samples. It's essentially an entirely computer-derived sound, but one that has real shape and scale. We put it on for background purposes but were distracted by the way the Cyrus pulled out so much deep lush bass and a pulsating elastic soundstage that got bigger and better as the volume was pushed.

To experiment, we combined the CD Xt SE with the DAC in a Resolution Audio Opus 21 CD player and fed the output to a Music First preamp, about five-and-a-half grand's worth of kit in all. It sounds more relaxed and better focused than the DAC XP, but lacks its scale and tight precision.

Cyrus has done a phenomenal job with the CD Xt SE; it is a transport that's as close to any reference product we've come across. In combination with the Cyrus DAC XP, it produces a remarkably well resolved and musically coherent result that, while a little on the exposed side for some material, makes most of our music even more real.