Well what can I say? In a world plagued with iPods and iPhones, docks and portable speakers have taken over. It’s not common now that you’d walk into someone’s home and see a beautiful audio seperates sitting there in the lounge. Most of them have been replaced by Bose Soundocks. Not to take anything away from Bose, they sound amazing. But I do miss seperate audio systems. But this is whre brands like Cyrus come in with their new Cyrus One offering.
Cyrus debuts 33 years ago, in 1983 with their Cyrus 1. It helped launch the audio experts into the industry with a bang and was hugely popular at the time. The Cyrus One is a reinvention of that original model, with up-to-date technology included of course. The unit is a standalone amplifier, made from a mixture of metal for the rear casing and plastic for the front glossy section. From firt glance the Cyrus One looks smart, and would fit well within any contemporary living room.
Being a seperate system, the Cyrus One needs to be paired with speakers. For the sake of review we’ve been using a set of Cabasse Minorca stereo speakers which although we’re absolutely huge, did the Cyrus One absolute justice by providing ground pounding bass hits and sharp crisp high notes. The amplifier provides the latest generation class-D amplification.
Being full of brand new technology means the amplifier can be hooked up to a Bluetooth enabled device: your phone, tablet or laptop to enable you to stream music to the One. It does however require a small downloadable app from Cyrus which worked for us without complication. Once inside the app, there is only one option; connect to amp. Once clicked, it prompts you to turn your Bluetooth on. Once switched on, it recognised the amp straight away. The app works as a controller for the Cyrus One, giving users the ability to select channels, a maximum volume and also which music you want to play on your phone. What was surprising is that there was no DAC, but AptX Bluetooth is still present for those higher quality streams from your phone.
Before moving on I want to mention that it does come with a puny remote control with rubber buttons. It almost feels like Cyrus were just ticking boxes with the inclusion of this as users would be much better off using their phones. But for those without smart phones in the house, it’s sufficient enough to control the amp without leaving your chair.
Speaking of channels, there are five in total. There are four analogue inputs, with one having an AV bypass mode so it can double as a power amplifier for you movie buffs out there. There’s even a a moving-magnet phono connection for connecting a turntable. The Cyrus One could easilly fit into your existing seperates set up without too much trouble, depending on the number of inputs you’ll need.
Being a class-D amplification technology, it’s designed to be optimised with a variety of speakers, depending on what you’re using. Cyrus has implimented what they’re calling SID (speaker impedance detection). This optimises sound quality and detect the impedence of a particular pair of speakers you have plugged into the device.
With this in mind, the Cyrus One sounded absolutely flawless. Bass tones thumped, and even at times through our Dubstep test, rumbled our floorboards enough to disturb my neighbour. Sorry about that. The mid-tones and high frequencies are equally balanced to work well with the lower tones. It took my breath away at just how loud this system went before we noticed even the smallest distortion. The only let down was a lack of spacial awareness during bigger orchestral tracks. It felt as if the track was all on one soundstage which was a shame. But afterall, this is a £700 amp, and Cyrus’ most affordable offering on the market at the moment.
Overall the Cyrus One impressed us a lot. Having access to analogue channels means nothing in your system becomes obsolete, yet the introduction of newer technologies like Bluetooth means the kids can also play their music how it was meant to be heard. Loud, full and glosyy and balanced. For any more information, or the chance to own one yourself, check out the Cyrus One website.
