Gryphon Pendragon Loudspeaker

Gryphon Audio Designs of Denmark celebrates the launch of the brand’s greatest loudspeaker achievement yet, as the semi-active, four-tower Gryphon Pendragon (150,000 Euro) takes its place at the pinnacle of the brand’s acclaimed loudspeaker line-up.

For nearly thirty years, Gryphon has been held in the highest regard among the audiophile cognoscenti for a unique personal vision and iconoclastic approach to the design of luxury High End home audio.

Conceived to be partnered with the Gryphon Pandora preamplifier and Mephisto (stereo) or Mephisto Solo (monoblock) power amplifiers, the three-way Gryphon Pendragon system employs a bass tower (eight 8” bass drivers per channel driven by a custom-designed 1000 Watt Gryphon Class A/B power amp) and an open baffle mounted with a two meter long dipolar planar magnetic thin-film ribbon (covering the 200 Hz – 18 kHz with no crossover in its operating range) alongside a vertical array of four dipolar Air Motion Transformer super-tweeters, specified to beyond 32 kHz.

The system’s philosophical underpinning is an Albert Einstein quote, widely referred to as Einstein’s Razor: “The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Gryphon founder and CEO Flemming E. Rasmussen elaborates, “We had committed considerable resources over the past decades to solving the many inherent problems of crossover networks, but it has always been in the back of our minds that eliminating a problem altogether is a far more elegant solution. By coming up with a single, broadband drive unit with ideal sound reproduction and mechanical behaviour across more than seven octaves, Gryphon Pendragon eliminates crossover components in the critical mid frequency range, preserving spectral and temporal integrity.”

Pendragon is available in what Gryphon describes as “virtually unlimited custom finish options.”

The Ribbon Panel

The Pendragon ribbon generates a continuous, perfectly coupled, cylindrical wavefront across its entire frequency range for a coherent, wide and deep soundfield. The system’s innate extremely wide and even horizontal dispersion with virtually nil vertical dispersion creates a large, stable sweet spot with none of the floor and ceiling reflections that muddy the sound of conventional multi-way systems.

The AMT Array

Because of their large surface area and pleated diaphragm, the Air Motion Transformers move a large air volume with minimal motion for lightning fast transients with flat frequency response well beyond the audible range with negligible distortion and a total absence of compression.

The AMT array incorporates a +/-1 dB attenuator for ideal integration with the acoustics of the listening space.

The Bass Tower

To keep pace with the extraordinary speed and openness of the dipolar drivers and eliminate the discontinuity that typically plagues “hybrid” speakers, the Gryphon Pendragon low-frequency system is a further refinement of the innovative Poseidon bass tower with eight custom designed 8” drive units and a built-in, specially designed Gryphon Class A/B power amplifier weighing in at 80 kg per channel and capable of 1,000 Watts continuous output. For extended headroom, peak power is approximately 4,000 Watts or 4.5 horsepower.

Active bass allows the user to select a separate amplifier for the high frequency panels without having to worry about the power demands of the massive Pendragon bass system.

Like every Gryphon product, Gryphon Pendragon is designed by Gryphon founder and CEO Flemming E. Rasmussen and manufactured in Denmark.

Source: Press Release