I think you'd struggle to get one for 50 quid, more like £200 is about the norm.

Maybe they got a bit better built later on - I bought one of the very first Cyrus 1s, within a couple of years the paint started falling off the knobs. I had it for about 10 years, and in that time it packed up once - "dry joint" the dealer told me, cost £40 to fix. That might qualify it as "unreliable", everything else I've ever bought lasted way longer than that without issues.