Cyrus SE Cd Players.

Cyrus has launched a new range of CD players with their "made for high end" transport engine. The theory (and the practice) is that the average CD player has a very generic laser read mechanism. The folks at Cyrus have gone the distance to spend the time and money on developing their own transport, greatly reducing jitter and read errors. In the HiFi system, it adds another layer to the detail in the music, bringing the listener one step closer to the music its self. What is very cool is that one can have an upgrade done for one's earlier version Cyrus CD player to the SE transport specification. An exerpt from the press relese: Our R&D team has unprecedented experience in optical storage technologies and high performance audio. Cyrus knows that the biggest limitation in hi-fi CD players is the laser and servo that reads the music from the disc because it is not specifically designed for high performance audio. In fact most CD players are based on optical kits of parts originally designed for mass produced products like boom-boxes or portable audio. Knowing this is a performance barrier, Cyrus spent 18 months developing our own CD engine specifically designed for the highest sound quality possible. The results sound obviously better, better even than our own award winning CD players that, until now, (like every other high-end audio manufacturer) have been based on mass produced optical kits. You don’t need to be an experienced hi-fi buff to appreciate the difference, the new SE based CD players sound obviously better because our CD engine is ‘made for high-end audio’. The Servo Evolution platform (SE) was developed by Cyrus in the UK to replace our dependence on OEM CD kits that a hi-fi company uses as the basis of CD players. While we (like several manufacturers) have learnt to improve jitter and a variety of other technical parameters in our DAC applications and power supplies, the CD kits we have used in the past are, in reality, developed for high volume applications such as automotive or low cost consumer models. Several of our Cyrus engineers have very CD specific CV’s and have considerably deeper skill sets in optical storage technology than any other audio company. This experience has allowed us to engineer our own CD servo system, which is not just software but importantly we are able to select the best hardware elements chosen from a smorgasbord of the finest available. (Normally you have to accept whatever the kit vendor has engineered to work together in the original mass production project). Cyrus’ SE engine is all the elements before the DAC, including our choice of disc loader, the laser, the motors and most importantly, the software that controls the laser travel, focus and data spiral tracking accuracy. The servo software is the bit that controls these components and allows our engineers to tune the elements for ultimate accuracy. So although CD players can be low cost, re-engineering the engine is a massive project and shows just what a miracle of modern engineering the optical disc drive really is. More information and specific models when I can drag my self away from listening to them... By the way SE actually stands for Servo Evolution. Not Special Edition. Not Social Education. Not even Space Exploration... Herwith a link to the SE website: Cyrus's webpage