“Exclusive. Danish. Peak performance. That’s how audiophiles view Flemming Rasmussen’s prestigious Gryphon Audio Designs brand.” www.sixmoons.com
Few High End manufacturers on either side of the electronics/loudspeaker divide have even attempted to bridge that gap. Fewer still have managed to do electronics and speakers equally well and be widely acknowledged as masters in both fields.
In less skilled hands, a loudspeaker system consisting of 38 drive units spread across four 237 cm tall towers could very easily turn into a Frankenstein’s monster science project. But precisely because the Gryphon design team is equally at ease with transducers as with amplification, they – perhaps uniquely – possess the necessary prowess and ambition to pull off the formidable feat that is the Gryphon Kodo four-tower reference loudspeaker system.
Beginning with the now legendary Gryphon Poseidon in 2004 (the first public result of 10 years of top secret, in-house experimentation), Gryphon has continued to explore the numerous benefits of a closer integration of electronics and loudspeakers in our top of the line products.
Now, the Gryphon Kodo stands as the pinnacle of the loudspeaker designer’s art and craft. In selecting a finish for your Gryphon Kodo loudspeaker system, the possibilities are limited solely by your imagination. Because the side panels are based on an original modular construction that makes removing and replacing them child’s play, your choice is no longer a one-time only, lifetime proposition.
The Four Towers
To return to the words of www.sixmoons.com – “The engineering team behind Gryphon’s speaker endeavours plays ball in the top leagues.”
Put simply, each Kodo section is a tower of strength and style.
Elegant and deceptively simple, the four towers that make up the Gryphon Kodo system are carefully conceived and executed multi-layer constructions for extreme structural integrity and acoustic damping.
The MDF side panels of the modules are reinforced with 5 mm aluminium panels. The stacked modules incorporate additional 8 mm aluminium panel supports.
The form moulded curved cosmetic exterior panels of laminated High-Density Fibreboard are damped with bitumen.
The solid aluminium base for each tower is fitted with adjustable, polyoxometalate feet.
The Kodo upper-frequency towers are laid out in a symmetrical vertical array of four 4”, exclusive Gryphon midrange drivers (two directly above and two directly below the central AMT high frequency driver) and six 5” Gryphon midbass drivers (three at the top and three at the bottom) to complement the bold design of the bass towers.
Each Gryphon Kodo bass tower houses eight custom designed 8” drive units and a built-in Gryphon power amplifier capable of 1,000 Watts continuous output into the drivers. For ultimate headroom, peak power is approximately 4,000 Watts or 4.5 horsepower.
The integrated bass system is conceived and born with a single purpose in life – to drive one specific set of drivers in one specific enclosure across a very narrowly defined frequency band. This is specialist audio at its ultimate extreme. Compared to the Gryphon Kodo, any so-called system, assembled from an assortment of unrelated products will inevitably fall short.
Gryphon Kodo offers highly desirable features such as remote adjustment of bass level from the listening position, low and high cut filters and a user-selectable bass system Q, an extremely important factor as matching system Q to the listening room’s own Q is the gateway to superior bass performance.