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Cyrus CD Xt Signature CD Transport

The Chap

pfm Member
Is there anyone out there using this transport? If so how have you found it with regard sound quality and regarding it not liking some discs?
 
You might like to join cyrusunofficial.co.uk and raise your question there.

And, just because bits are bits, don't think that all digital transports sound the same. Sure, DACs make the biggest difference, but a transport and its interface with the DAC can sound different, particularly CD transports of which some are better at avoiding error correction to start with, and some are better at dealing with error correction when required.
 
Yup.

They all sound the same but some sound better than others.

Actually, my experience is that the transport quality is more significant than the DAC. The old "Garbage In - Garbage Out" analogy comes to mind.
 
The predecessor in the Cyrus range the CDXT sounds very different with and without a PSX-R power supply attached and this is only powering the motor of the transport!
You can't make sweeping statements that they all sound the same unless you have heard all of them.
 
The predecessor in the Cyrus range the CDXT sounds very different with and without a PSX-R power supply attached and this is only powering the motor of the transport!
You can't make sweeping statements that they all sound the same unless you have heard all of them.

agreed . I recently have been using a cyrus cd 8x . pretty good but not as good as the msb cd data 4 .
as some have said the cyrus forum is a good place to discuss

the cyrus player I have is extremely tempermental . it won`t play some flac recorded discs and sometimes takes several attempts before playing. apparently cyrus charge 250 to repair and the fault `no disc` often comes back
 
I tried using my Cyrus 6s as a transport via Toslink to a DAC. A disc got stuck in the tray so I had to dismantle it to free the stuck disc. What I saw put me right off. Loads of style to the case but flimsy transport mechanism, cut myself messing with it.

I will keep it as a spare but.....
 

Sums up my experience, I lost a load of money on a transport I got very little use out of because it was faulty for most of the time I owned it. It was always back at Cyrus, I was refused a refund or replacement, instead they suggested I give them something in the order of £650 to "upgrade" it to latest spec so as it wouldn't keep breaking. Latest spec meant revised design to fix existing design flaws, my reply contained a few profanities.
 
Having updated the firmware to 1.4 no issues so far, I suggest you check the version and if so update it before sending it back to Cyrus. As for sound quality this is the best transport I have personally listened to.
 
+1, I've had my CDXT signature for over a year with no major problems and it sounds fantastic with deeper bass, wider imaging, higher treble than the CDXT 2 I had before. However these players are intolerant of dirty and scratched discs. without a doubt transports do sound different and being the first link in the chain are very important to get right.
 
Most Cyrus people seem to be liking the CD XT Signature. S/H there's someone asking about £950 on Cyrus Unofficial. You can't PSXR it as Cyrus did not make it possible as they say it doesn't need it and they managed to build the power supplies needed for it to run optimally right within in from the off.

I'm looking at one myself but have a CDXTSE2 with a PSXR so I'm at the step immediately below it and am not sold on the net cost of the upgrade yet. (My CDXTSE2 needs that PSXR, it sounds so much better with it).

I wouldn't be surprised if it's a little fussy on discs at all, it's been mentioned in reviews already. That's the downside of the last few Cyrus players in my experience.

(Oh, and every single CD transport I have tried sounds different, the scale of the soundstage and the detail levels differ, and some sound more 'grainy' and others more 'natural/analogue').
 
I moved down from a rather disc-fussy CEC 51 to a it-will-play-anything-no-matter-how-scratched Cambridge Audio DVD 540 and the drop in sound quality was minor in comparison with the comfort of it playing literally everything.

I would suggest that, in my experience, transports do not sound the same but the differences can be rather exaggerated compared to issues like how fussy the transport is concerning scratched, dirty, copy-protected and imperfect discs and how much motor noise it lets out into the room...
 
I had a Philips £350 CD player. When I went on to a NAIM NAC32 and NAP 110 with a SNAPS from a guru hifi bloke who buys and sells. Roy Orbison sounded coloured. He said I need a DAC and came up with an AVI which sorted it out. Then I was offered a second hand Meridian 602 and 606 to which the guru strongly did not recommend. But I went ahead. When he came down to tell me "I told you so" he was surprised and admitted that I had made a good buy.
When we put the AVI DAC on place of the 606. It was lacking in bass extension and generally not quite as good but price for price was value for money. However the point I am making is that it was infinlately better than having the Phillips as transport. It was a world of difference.
 


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