Commander
The culmination of Gryphon’s four decades of philosophies, design goals and engineering expertise are fully realized in Commander: the most advanced preamplifier ever made.
COMMANDER
HOW GRYPHON BUILT THE PERFECT PREAMPLIFIER
Since our company’s founding nearly 40 years ago, the philosophy of Gryphon Audio Designs of Denmark has remained constant: the relentless pursuit of sonic perfection without commercial compromises in design, construction or cost. All Gryphon products have been conceived in this same perfectionist spirit: uncompromising engineering in the service of music. Impeccable build quality complemented by our original, highly refined “Nordic Noir” aesthetic sensibility and absolute simplicity of use.
Our starting point for Commander was Gryphon’s extraordinary Pandora, widely regarded as one of the world’s finest preamplifiers. Commander shares Pandora’s Dual-Mono layout with separate chassis for signal and power supply circuitry. Pandora’s single-ended Class A input buffer is retained, as it offers the compelling advantage of passing the signal through the smallest possible number of electrical components–two transistors and a single resistor–yielding sound that is exceptionally transparent, fast, natural and open. Neither preamplifier employs any global negative feedback
Naturally, Commander embodies major advances in many sonically-critical areas, including a high-precision, extremely low noise voltage reference in connection with the analogue series regulators which supply the amplifier stages. The Commander’s voltage reference has approximately 50 times lower noise than the already-excellent reference used in Pandora! A pair of fully discrete, linear power supplies feed each channel’s analog circuit while a third is dedicated to the digital control circuitry, thus maintaining absolute mechanical separation and electrical isolation between digital and analog sections.
The distinctive finish of the Gryphon Commander and its companion Apex power amplifier symbolizes the authority and vitality of their music reproduction, which set new standards in such crucial aspects as timing, bass control, dynamic expansion and transparency. Commander’s power supply includes four custom-made toroidal transformers—two per stereo channel—engineered for minimal noise. Two of these (one per channel) power the dual-mono preamplifier circuits while the second pair are reserved for upcoming Gryphon source components, thereby ensuring a future-proof upgrade path.
