Gryphon Ethos CD Player
REFERENCE AUDIO – WITHAM ESSEX
BOB’s Review Series - No 27 – Gryphon Ethos Compact Disc Player / Digital to Analogue Converter
Introduction – Those with long memories or a fondness for old movies may remember Dick Van Dyke who stared in Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where he “perfected” his Americanised Cockney accent. Faced with the Gryphon Ethos CD Player he may well have empathised with those born within earshot of the Bow Bells and said something like ‘Cor blimy mate, thirty bags of sand for a CD Player, you’re avin a Giraffe’.
And he would’ve been right of course, £32,500 (at the time of writing) for a CD player is an astonishing price to pay for a format that many say is in terminal decline. But putting that into perspective it’s easy to be very spendy on a topflight turntable that will still needs an arm and a cartridge or an equal amount on a top of range preamp or DAC. I’ve read recently that Goldmund have just released an SACD Player priced at more than 6 times that of the Gryphon Ethos under review here, yes £175,000 for a CD Player, but hey, it does also play SACD! Supercar money indeed. Even so the Ethos can’t be described as a bargain unless it takes pride of place in a probable six figure system with amplifiers and speakers in all at similar prices.
During most of my career I was a qualified architect so good design is second nature to me and I can only applaud the founder of Gryphon, Flemming Erik Rasmussen for his desire to bring his own design background to full effect with Gryphon products. He has degrees in Painting and Graphic Design and a background in industrial design and fine arts and this has clearly informed his sense of the importance of design into all their products. Rasmussen is now in retirement, but his legacy clearly lives on at Gryphon. This is one of a very small list of audio products that my better half actually commented on as looking good.
I’ve been a constant user of CD right from the get-go in 1983/84 when CD players first appeared in UK shops. I still own both players I bought at that time, a Toshiba XR-Z90 and a Marantz CD63, both still working and both with original boxes. I also own three other CD players: – a Meridian 200 Transport, a Sony CDP-X3000ES and a Shanling SCD T-200. Interestingly, like the Ethos all of them have a certain visual aesthetic appeal and three of them are top loading. the Marantz, Shanling and Sony X3000ES are all top loading machines and the Toshiba is front loading via a drop down window, a bit like loading a cassett. I guess I like the idea of some user involvement in the loading and playing of CDs and the Ethos exemplifies this cause.
Interestingly just a few years ago one of Gryphon’s fellow Scandinavian audio manufacturers released what they advertised at the time as being ‘Your last CD Player’ and even gave it an appropriate endgame name, perhaps a rethink is in order because I can’t see this trend towards even higher end CD Players ending any time soon and it seems there is still a healthy market for a £30k+ CD player.
In my last review (No 26) of the Gryphon Diablo 300 amplifier, I gave a potted history of Gryphon as I did when reviewing their Scorpio S CD Player (No 04) so I don’t intend to go into too much company detail again here, suffice to say they are based in Denmark and can supply you with a complete system including speakers, amplifiers, phono stages, CD players, equipment stands and cables.
Technology – This CD Player is an aesthetic delight, its triangular form, solid alloy casework and hinged manual top loading tray with gold puck make it stand out from the crowd and its tactile use is akin to playing vinyl. It measures 480mm wide, 453mm deep and 178mm high and weighs 13.7kg so it needs a good-sized stand to house it. It runs in Class A and is powered via two internal toroidal transformers. To operate it you need to manually lift the circular transport cover by the gold-plated finger lift which is attached to a funky curved bracket/arm that hinges open to reveal the transport tray which is bathed in a blue light. Insert a CD, place the gold-plated puck in place, manually close the lid and it only takes a few seconds for the Ethos to read the TOC and you’re ready to go. The Player sits on three large and adjustable feet to allow levelling and it comes with a small circular level for just this purpose. The spiked feet come with cups to protect your furniture and a dedicated remote control is also provided. A nice touch is the inclusion of a soft leather Gryphon embossed circular coaster onto which you can place the puck whilst inserting a CD. The Player has outputs on fully balanced XLR, and RCA and the front panel is the now familiar Gryphon Vacuum Fluorescent Display which is dimmable in stages. It has several user adjustable settings, some accessible on the player and some such as filtering and upsampling only available via the remote.
The Ethos is not just a CD player because it’s possible to access the built in DAC for use by other digital sources such as streamers. The Ethos DAC now uses the latest* ESS Sabre ES9038 Pro DAC chips, one per channel. Whilst this chip can top out at 768kHz via USB and 384kHz/32-bit via PCM the Ethos has been set to top out at 384kHz via USB and whilst this chip is also capable of full MQA decoding Gryphon seem not to have enabled MQA processing, probably a licensing issue or perhaps like some other DAC manufacturers they just don’t like MQA. The Ethos is however a Roon ready device, and this makes it easy to use with streamers or other network devices. It’s also capable of upsampling incoming data streams to DSD levels but my audition was undertaken using the native data stream inputs and outputs. It incorporates no less than 7 PCM user selectable filters and 3 DSD filters. The DAC has a USB type B input together with S/PDIF on BNC and AES/EBU on XLR. It also has an AES/EBU XLR output. Besides having an accessible DAC this is just a plain CD Player and it will not play SACD’s or DVD’s etc.
*ESS have recently announced the availability of their latest chip, the ES 9033Q.
System Components used in this Review:
- Amplifiers: Gryphon Essence Pre and Power amps.
- Digital Sources: Sony CDP X3000ES CD
- Streamer: Innuos Statement
- DAC: PS Audio Directstream DAC
- Analogue Sources: Pioneer F-91 FM Tuner with Ron Smith Roof Mounted Ariel
- Streaming Sources: Tidal and Qobuz – Roon Management
- Speakers: Marten Mingus Quintet
Performance – Right from the first few bars of the first CD you play on the Ethos you are aware of being in the presence of something very special. It stands out from the pack by such a large margin because it just sounds right and by that, I mean that it doesn’t have that ‘digital’ sound of early CD players and makes you want to play CD after CD and sit there completely stunned that red-book CD can sound this good. Not once whilst I had the Ethos in my home system did I contemplate listening to my streamer or any other source other than for review purposes. I’ve always believed that if your system sounds good from outside your listening room then you are onto something, but Gryphon have countered this by saying ‘the peerless finish, build quality, ergonomics and pride of ownership … can only be fully understood and appreciated up close and in person’ and they are spot on, but it still sounded great from the Kitchen.
Listening to Compact Disc - It really doesn’t matter what CD you first play; it will sound just as good as the last one you played during your first listening experience with the Ethos and that experience will live with you for a long time. I played so many CDs before writing any notes that I can’t recall what the first one was but at some point, I played the ‘Ophelia’ CD by Natalie Merchant and the Ethos gelled it all together providing warmth to the bass, detail to the midrange and sparkle to the highs without at any time sounding harsh, or brittle as early CD players were prone to do.
The recent Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie album is a good example of two long term friends finding that special bond that allows them to anticipate and harmonise their singing with real emotion (Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris can do the same) and the Ethos seemed to understand and build on their special relationship better than any other CD Player I have used. It found content on CDs that I’d not heard before which is surely something all audiophiles strive for. The Ethos seems to thrive on enhancing the listening experience adding weight to the bottom end, clarity to the midrange and sparkle to the highs but mostly adding emotion in a way that make long listening sessions inevitable. I couldn’t fault the way it goes about extracting information from a format designed in the 70’s and implemented in the 80’s and recorded at just 16 bit/44.1kHz resolution. If you have a good stock of CD’s and an Ethos to play them on you won’t feel any temptation to play so called high-res files, CD has it all covered. It can’t play SACD but I don’t think it needs to, plain CD just sounds so good.
It will of course play those rare UHQCD’s from Japan that try and mostly succeed to give a better sound than basic red-book CD, and this was the case with the Dire Straits ‘Brothers In Arms’ UHQCD which added an extra dimension to the recording.
‘The Snake’ from Desperate Man by Eric Church starts with some simple guitar picking and the Ethos resolved this well and highlighted his finger slides on the guitar that other players find but don’t highlight as well. The track soon opens into a rhythmic beat supporting his gravelly voice, but they were not fighting each other for your attention, they were just supporting each other perfectly. This is harder to reproduce than it sounds, and the Ethos met the challenge perfectly.
Moving back in time more than 50 years to Abbey Road by the Beatles, albeit playing the 2009 remastered edition and the Fab Four were seemingly performing just for me. How I wish I could have seen them live. ‘Come Together’, the opening track gets a lot of play, and the Ethos was able to deliver Ringo’s rolling drumbeats that underpin this track so well showing how talented a drummer he is. Again, I ended up playing the whole album and for sure the 24bit/96kHz high-res download version is also of a high standard, but the Ethos CD Player can deliver plain CD like nothing before it.
Listening to the on-board Digital to Analogue Converter – I used the DAC without enabling the upsampling that it is capable of, and my first listen was by streaming the Bob Harris live Radio 2 broadcast on a Thursday evening. He played one of my favourite tracks from Little Big Town called ‘Girl Crush’ and it was hard to believe it was just a 324kbps/48Hz stream. It sounded every bit like a high-res track and of course I had to listen to the whole hour broadcast with Bob’s distinctive voice and complete subject knowledge keeping my full attention played through the Ethos DAC.
I listened to some CD’s I had ripped to the Innuos hard drive and music streamed from Tidal and Qobuz and it was clear that the Ethos uses DAC chips from ESS and not AKM, delivering a sound signature similar in nature to the Matrix Audio Sabre Pro DAC. However, because the Ethos uses a pair of the Sabre ES9038 chips instead of a single chip shared between channels and probably better internal components, it delivered a much more engaging sound. By this I mean better clarity, better and stronger dynamics, a wider and deeper soundstage and a much more inviting and involving musical experience.
Manufacturers who rely on the marketplace to source their DAC chips rather than design their own can improve performance from the off the shelf chips by applying their specialist design knowledge of circuitry and the use of better components and Gryphon have done just that with the Ethos relying on ES Sabre chips but also their own in-house expertise in circuit design and implementation. Gryphon clearly understand how to extract the maximum from the ESS9038 chips, and this shows directly in the capability of the Ethos whether using its DAC for CD playback or when playing other digital sources through it.
Conclusion – When you stand in front of a painting in a gallery, particularly by one of the recognised master’s you are looking at so much more than a canvass with a picture on it. The closer you look the more information seems to flow between you and the artist filling the gap, which may be many centuries, between the artists last brush stroke and you standing there today. This is art of communication, and this is ART, it’s what defines the painter and how he can affect your senses and emotions across generations. Listening to music has a similar impact on your mood and wellbeing and your relationship to those around you and those emotions are profound. There can be a considerable time between the composer laying down a track in the studio and you playing it back in your home. Having listened to a great deal of audio equipment during the recent lockdowns I have found that there are a very few pieces of equipment that leave behind a real sense of loss when you take it out of your system and the Gryphon Ethos is one of those rare products. Having retired from architecture I’m not able to raise the funds to purchase the Ethos but if I could then I would do so without a second thought regardless of other components in my home system.
More than highly recommended, if only I had more sand.
Bob – Team Reference Audio