This idiosyncratic system will sprinkle a little musical magic dust on your digital sources
This is where we move things up a level or two all round from our bargain £1600 turntable and streaming system. Unconventional in many ways, the members of this quartet combine beautifully to create a thoroughly modern, fully digital system that takes those ones and zeroes and maxes them up to 10; or perhaps that should be 11?
Compact disc player: Cyrus CDi
We’ll kick things off here with the main source. Reports of the compact disc’s death have been greatly exaggerated over the past few years – partly, it’s true, because of the stubborn, wonderful refusal of the turntable to reverse its impressive upward trend. But when you consider that most streaming platforms, and certainly the most popular of them, don’t provide music at the quality that a CD offers, it’s clear that there is plenty of life left in the silver disc.
The Cyrus CDi currently sets the benchmark at its price. And as the consistent stream of What Hi-Fi? Awards that it has won over the years can attest, it has been a perennial leader in its field.
It presents the uniform, articulate and intuitive presentation that we expect from a more expensive player. There is a bucket-load of detail and precision: each layer of a track is precisely unpeeled, with every instrument coming through with coherent flow and tact.
It is this fine CD player’s rhythmic talent, though, that truly raises our eyebrows. Pace and momentum are exercised with articulation and vibrancy, and we find ourselves entertained by the Cyrus’s dynamic agility and neutral balance in a way that is rare at this price.
DAC and streaming module: Chord Mojo2/Poly
Our second digital source is rather more unusual than the CD player in the system. Chord is one of our go-tos for digital to analogue converters, with What Hi-Fi? Awards coming out of its ears for its high-end DACs. The Mojo 2 is Chord’s entry-level offering, and it’s a joy, appropriately enough – the name Mojo comes from a conflation of ‘mobile joy’.
We have married the Mojo 2 here with its Poly partner, a neat little attachment that opens up streaming abilities to the DAC, in the form of DLNA, AirPlay, Bluetooth and microSD card playback.
And, in terms of musical matrimony, the Poly and Mojo make a lovely couple; they really do complete each other. Sonically, this is a match made in hi-fi heaven.
We absolutely loved the original Mojo, but Chord has advanced things in pretty much every sonic are
