All Eyes On Cyrus Audio

Let’s jump in with some state-of-the-art high end kit that attracted a lot of attention at the recent Bristol Sound & Vision Show (UK) held each year at the Marriot City Centre Hotel.  

As CD sales continue to decline, the race is on with true Hi-Fi manufacturers to develop products not only capable of streaming our ever growing digital music collections around the home, but to quality levels that can at least match or out-perform the faithful spinning disc.

We’ve all grown accustomed to the new conveniences digital music can bring.  Can you imagine playing just one or two albums from the same artist all night to your guests at a dinner party now?  Excusing ones self to change the disc every hour, squinting up and down your disc rack after a few large glasses of red for the new Groove Armada album which turns out is in the car glove box anyway.  The market expectation and technology has clearly moved on. 

However, just like vinyl purists, those of us who have sampled what true Hi-Fi audio can do with a well recorded compact disc, aren’t ready to let go as easily as the mainstream consumer.  We have a few conditions to met first. Whilst making iTunes playlists and hitting shuffle works fine in the gym, when it comes to relaxing in the calm and quiet of our own home (it can happen!) we don’t want to put compressed digital music files through our system either.  To us, this is going backwards.  We would like uncompressed full quality digital music as the minimum, with the potential to go beyond CD resolution and still retain those iPod generation conveiniences.

And so too have Cyrus Audio it seems who have been busy investing no less than 118,000 hours of R&D over the past 5 years coming up with 3 new digital music network streaming products that can live up to everyone’s high expectations.

Cyrus Audio are based near Cambridge in the UK and have been having a stellar run of late, catering nicely to the mid to high end markets and collecting a huge number of awards from the trade press along the way.  Known for using a somewhat understated compact chassis across the entire range of products, it could be argued you tend to buy Cyrus for performance over looks.  They also offer a ‘return to base’ product upgrade path so you can move up the range without actually changing anything other than the inside electronics.  At this point you’ll surely be raising a scheming eyebrow if you’re thinking what I’m thinking?..

Here’s a very fast paced video from the guys at What Hi-Fi? Magazine explaining the forthcoming offering…just make sure you know your feature acronyms (I'm sure you know NAS & DAC's aren't stock markets..) before pressing play.