For over twenty years now, we’ve been reviewing CD players ‘made by’ specialist manufacturers – a proportion of which are manufactured by a very small number of companies (originally Philips or Sony, these days just as likely to be an unpronounceable Chinese outfit), who produce CD transport mechanisms as complete assemblies. Take one of these, add a D-A converter, an output stage, a display and a power supply and you’ve ‘made’ a CD player... of sorts.

The CD-8X is built into the usual Cyrus die-cast case, it is quite a shoe-horn job with two circuit boards carefully mounted above and below the rear extension of the CD transport and two toroidal transformers squeezed in too.

Cyrus's CD players bear more than a little external resemblance to each other, but this is the company's top model among one-box players, mostly a CD8 but with the 'x' suffix, signifying that certain aspects owe much to the two-box CD Xt/DAC X combination