Some time ago, an amplifier in for review caught fire when first powered up. I don’t mean it smoked and sizzled and shut down—I mean that actual flames shot through the top grate. Fortunately, I was able to grab a kitchen fire extinguisher and douse the thing with foam. (Sorry, this was decades ago, and I don’t remember the brand, but I think the company had a fire sale and was shut down.)
Another time, a representative of an amplifier manufacturer visited for an install. Once everything was connected and ready to be powered up, he assumed an unusually defensive stance. He turned his back to the amplifier, reached behind it, and, with a grimace on his face and eyeing the exit, flipped the power rocker on. Nothing exploded, and the amplifier powered up, but it was not a confidence-inspiring performance.
A “massive” upgrade
With those late ’80s experiences in mind, I watched the Gryphon Apex Stereo, a manatee of an amplifier at 445lb, as it was tipped on its side so that it could pass through the door and be rolled on a dolly into my listening room. The pair of linebacker-sized piano movers entrusted with the task skillfully, carefully positioned the Gryphon in the designated space between my reference monoblocks then deftly righted it, landing it gently on its feet without raising a speck of dust from the old carpet. Whatever their fee, it was worth it!
Packaging a nearly 500lb behemoth for safe shipping and easy unpacking is an engineering challenge of its own. It took a great deal of ingenuity to implement packaging for the Apex that satisfies both criteria. It makes clever use of slippery sliding sheets—the kind used in hospitals to move patients—to slide the amp off its shipping pallet, and it includes an inflatable air wedge (specifically, a Winbag, footnote 1) to raise the amp, once off the pallet, one side at a time to remove the shock-absorbing shipping feet and, optionally, install the supplied spiked feet.
If you saw the Gryphon Apex Stereo amp on static display at AXPONA and noted how big it seemed in that large space, imagine how big it appears in my modest-sized listening room. It is nearly 3′ deep, intimidating in its monolithic black oneness. It commands attention with a black hole pull.
The Gryphon Apex replaced a pair of darTZeel monoblocks in my system. Everything else remained the same, including the darTZeel NHB-18NS preamplifier. I carefully connected the amp to the speakers and to the preamp’s balanced outputs and plugged the two AC cables into dedicated 20A lines. (I don’t think this review would be possible if the electrical system of my house had not been upgraded a few months ago.) Once I was certain that all connections were correct, I flipped the two rear-panel power switches then tapped the red Standby icon on the touchscreen, bringing the Apex to life.
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
Red error lights flashing across the top of the touchscreen evoked flaming amplifiers in my mind and got my adrenaline flowing. Temperature Error, DC/HF Error, AC Phase—it looked like a massive failure through high temperatures and catastrophic input current. Had I crossed the speaker wires?
Thirty seconds of panic evaporated with the click of a relay, which extinguished the error lights and put the amp into Play mode. This was all completely normal. Whew!
You could admonish me for not reading the manual first. I did so later and learned that “all display indications will flash for approximately 25 seconds before the amplifier is fully operational.” The Gryphon Apex will always be installed by a dealer, but I think it would be a good idea to provide a heads-up warning about those flashing error lights early in the manual and not wait until page 21. (Not that it would have helped me, since, when it happened, I had not cracked the manual at all.)
That is the last negative comment you’ll read in this review about the Gryphon Apex Stereo amplifier.
Design and features
The Gryphon Apex Stereo and the sibling Apex Mono amplifiers (which were not auditioned here) are both powerful, cost-no-object designs. Both are biased heavily into class-A, meaning that the transistors never turn off, from the largest positive voltage through the maximum negative voltage. It’s an inefficient way to bias transistors, but in addition to producing high electricity bills and a lot of heat, class-A bias also results in very low distortion and ear-pleasing sonics.
Gryphon says it distrusts autobiasing schemes that claim to dynamically adapt bias to changing conditions to optimize performance, believing such schemes have more to do with marketing than with technology. Gryphon admits that class-A entails heavy transformers, very large heatsinks, and large quantities of expensive metal and parts.
The inherent inefficiency of a class-A amplifier means that the Apex Stereo’s massive dual-mono design, which uses 32 very high-current bipolar output transistors per channel, produces just 210W at 8 ohms. Available power dramatically increases, however, as load impedance decreases: 420 watts at 4 ohms, 800 watts at 2 ohms, and 1490 watts at 1 ohm. This makes it an ideal amplifier for driving speakers with punishing loads. The Wilson Audio Specialties XVX, for example, ranges from 2 to 4 ohms throughout most of the audioband but dips to as low as 1.6 ohms at 326Hz. Based on Gryphon’s specs, the more punishing the load, the better this amplifier performs.
Other design features include zero global feedback, 1,040,000µF capacitor banks—more than a farad of capacitance!—2kVA toroidal transformers, low-capacitance, class-A J-FET input buffers, balanced, dual-differential class-A input circuitry followed by a fast, symmetrical class-A voltage amplification stage, DC-servo coupling, four-layer 105µm (or less) copper-printed circuit boards, and many other build and circuit features. As with the recently reviewed Gryphon Apex Commander preamplifier, the designers paid particular attention to mechanical isolation.
Three bias options are available, selectable through the front-panel touchscreen: Low for efficient, noncritical listening; Medium, which provides 100W of pure class-A while higher power as class A/B; and High, which is 100% class-A power, for the ultimate performance. The instructions caution that after changing the bias setting, the amp requires approximately 45 minutes to “settle” before the effect on sound can be assessed.
I ran the amp the entire time in High; let the electricity bill be what it may.
In the interest of energy efficiency and environmental responsibility, Gryphon incorporates a feature the company terms “green bias.” When using the Apex with Gryphon’s Commander preamp, the two can be linked with a special cable that allows adjustment of the bias according to programmable switching points within the preamp’s volume control. I wasn’t supplied with the accessory and did not test this feature.
Footnote 1: A useful tool. See winbagusa.com. Also available at amazon.com.—Jim Austin
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COMPANY INFO
Gryphon Audio Designs ApS
US distributor: Gryphon Audio N.A.
(201) 690-9006
gryphon-audio.com
ARTICLE CONTENTS
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Specifications
Associated Equipment
Measurements
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