Cyrus One

[bobvfr]

Anyone got one, care to comment on them at all?

That's the new Cyrus One I am talking about by the way.

[Tim]

I don't have one but went to a Cyrus road-show recently at a local Hi-Fi store and had a play around. I was very impressed and it sounded far better than it should have playing music via Bluetooth from my phone into a pair of Spendor A2's. I assume you mean this one?



I used to own nothing but Mission and had a Cyrus I for years, so know the concept and how they sounded. My only criticism of older Mission/Cyrus gear was I sometimes found it too edgy sound-wise and a tad analytical, which could become fatiguing. I didn't find this the case here, but hard to tell over just and hour or so and the Spendors certainly aren't fatiguing. A phono input is good, but we didn't investigate how it performed.

I liked it a lot, beautifully built, nearly as solid as the older models and the headphone socket is a real bonus. It looked and sounded classy, certainly worth the cost IMO if that's the type of amp/budget you are after. Simple to set up and being a file based audio guy, it liked how it worked with files from my phone, so you can have a really simple system.

So its certainly strong competition for other amps at this price point like the new Brio-R, the aptX Bluetooth is very appealing for playing music from peoples phones, especially if you had mates round firing random songs at it for fun. Obviously it has limitations sound-wise this way, but I don't think it's intended for serious listening, a direct feed for that. Definitely worth trying for a home demo, oh final thing I didn't like, the remote is pants.

[bobvfr]

A week is a long time in lusting after Hi-Fi.......

I was in the market for a CD player to go replace my ancient and decrepit Philips CD101 to go with my Tannoys and Quad 33/405, but after doing some thinking I am now Flacing all my CD's, the Xbox One is an surprising good CD player if I need to play one.

Given my setup is a mixture of sound, vision and the other stuff an Xbox can do, and wanting as "Minimal" looking system the Quads don't work as they can't be remote controlled, the Pioneer AV receiver I have is ugly. Much prefer stereo to 5.1 etc.

So I saw the Cyrus and thought what about the following as a system:

All music in .flac format using VLC

Tannoy Cheviots.

Cyrus One.

Xbox One X (Updated Xbox One with 4k streaming and teraflops of stuff). OK there will be a couple of other boxes like the external hard drive and Freesat box but I can hide all of this.

Panasonic 65 inch 4k TV

Then I can have VLC on my Surface Pro 4 and phones, the same for my wife's set up of Xbox, Surface and phone.

I really like the look of the Cyrus and its gets pretty decent reviews, may pop down to some shops and have a listen to the Cyrus tomorrow.

Not given the Bluetooth option much thought.

[Tim]

I think given your plans and expectations, you won't be disappointed with the Cyrus One.

For me I would consider a dedicated media player rather than VLC, JRiver media center is what I use and it can be controlled by everything you want to control it with. VLC will do the job, but JRiver or something similar will give you more options. Foobar2000 is IMO a better option too, if you don't want to spend money on the player.

But I think it would fit that set-up very well, which ever way you choose to play your FLAC files

[Intenso]

Can't offer much apart from to say my 1st real amp was a Cyrus 1 back in '85 it sounded wonderful to me at the time matched to some Tannoy MC20 Golds.

I later 'upgraded' to a Cyrus 2 which was awful to my ears, a very hard and sharp sound.

I had to wait 3 years before I could afford to get rid of it!

Anyway, good luck with your quest...

[Pharos]

I found the Cyrus II with PSX rather spitchy.