The Cyrus CDi has an enviable record: this year, it has won an astonishing 12 consecutive What Hi-Fi? Award trophies in a row. That is undoubtedly impressive, but this feat alone isn’t enough to guarantee itself a place in our Hall of Fame of significant hi-fi and home cinema products.
It’s the CDi’s superb sonic performance, coupled with proven reliability of a terrifically built design that has worked without a hitch for the 12 years we have been using our review sample, that cements its everlasting impact in the CD-player category.
It was first reviewed in 2014 and got its first Award win that year, but we couldn’t have predicted just how much of an enduring product this Cyrus would be. In the past dozen years, CD’s popularity has waned and only recently has had a small but clear resurgence alongside vinyl; Cyrus has brought out two new CD players; and the CDi itself has yoyo-ed in price, from £995 to a high of £1495 and back down to £999 again.
Even though the CDi’s design looks rather dated, it’s hard not to be a little charmed and more than impressed by the uncompromising, sturdy build quality of this little beast. It follows the same functional and half-width chassis blueprint laid down by previous Cyrus CD players and amplifiers. The basic black-on-green display looks rather Jurassic compared with slicker, modern OLED screens (as seen on Cyrus’s newer, pricier 40 CD Award-winner), and its slot-loading mechanism makes such a racket when accepting a disc.
But who cares, when it all works so perfectly? The buttons are responsive and reliable, the screen is simple but easy to read, and the build quality could survive a nuclear blast – or at least, any knocks and bumps from multiple office moves. And during playback, the CD player is blissfully quiet.
The CDi has single optical and coaxial outputs, and the focus is purely on performance and reading the data on CDs as accurately as possible. Its clock stability and bespoke Servo Evolution disc-reading engine, which relies on reading data correctly the first time (rather than relying on error correction), all serve to deliver a performance that is beautifully precise, detailed, punctual and brimming with rare rhythmic talent.
Its dynamic agility and neutral balance delivers music as varying as complex Shostakovich compositions to sparse Joni Mitchell recordings to a modern hip-hop track with all melody, expression and integrity intact. Each layer of the composition is precisely unpeeled, there are buckets of detail, and there is articulacy and subtlety here that we would expect to find in more expensive players.
Altogether it delivers a captivating, toe-tapping performance. There’s power and punch when dealing with sub-bass and thumping beats, too. Simply put, the Cyrus doesn’t bat an eyelid with whatever music we throw its way.
We have played such a range of CDs, artists and genres through the CDi over the past 12 years. And each time, the Cyrus CDi ensures the music sounds both revealing and entertaining.
No, it may not be the sexiest product; but it is a testament to the solid engineering and dependable design basics laid down by Cyrus’s engineers that means this excellent CD player continues to perform so well, and has continued to delight us for so many years. A worthy, well-deserved entrant to our 2025 Hall of Fame.
MORE:
Read our full Cyrus CDi review
Check out all the What Hi-Fi? 2025 Award winners
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