Like a turntable's record clamp, there's a gold-plated disc clamp whilst three of Gryphon's Atlas footers make for precision leveling. There's their usual vacuum-fluorescent display with variable brightness and personalized input naming. There are 4-layer PCB with 70mm copper traces, 20'000μF/ch capacitance for the analog output stage, side-mounted heat sinks, a polished acrylic body and brushed aluminium top plate for constrained-layer damping. With Ethos, anyone who proclaimed CD dead was a zombie. In the same breath, it's perfectly fair to state that the core audience will be 50-something audiophiles whose often vast CD collections stay on heavy rotation. Ethos intends to give those libraries a new lease on life. Forget brooding Hamlet. It's definitely to be.
By December 19th 2019, the first English review explained just how. Stereophile's Jason Victor Serinus closed out on this note: "… my response to the sound of the Gryphon Ethos CD player and digital-to-analog converter requires more smileys and flowery GIFs than this space can reproduce. The Ethos is one open, marvelously detailed and fresh-sounding unit that makes listening to music an absolute joy."
One month later, Gryphon entered their 35th year of operations. Being exactly half that age, now it was our turn to triangulate this polycarbonate circle. For an update on the continued relevance of CD, consider this darko.audio article on 2019 sales figures in the UK. That the format enjoys continued high-end hardware support is shown by brands like Accuphase, Accustic Arts, AMR, Ancient, Audionet, B.M.C, Burmester, C.E.C, Esoteric, Gold Note, Jadis, Jay's Audio, JMF, Luxman, Métronome, mbl, Nagra, T+A and many more. Just so, today's Ethos looks undeniably distinctive even within that crowd. There it's one of the first to exploit the latest StreamUnlimited transport [old CD-Pro2 at left, new CD-Pro8 S "with aluminium chassis, carbon-fiber cover and carbon-fiber turntable" at right].
Gryphon at Warsaw's hifi show in 2019
The digital filter options for the Sabre 9038 Pro's PCM processing are,
1/ slow roll-off, minimum phase
2/ slow roll-off, linear phase
3/ brickwall
4/ hybrid (default)
5/ apodizing
6/ fast roll-off minimum phase
7/ fast roll-off linear phase.
For DSD, there are the three typical choices of
1/ 50kHz -3dB pass band frequency (default)
2/ 60kHz -3dB pass band frequency
3/ 70kHz -3dB pass band frequency.
Output impedance is 30/60Ω on RCA/XLR respectively.
All user-set upsampling goes automatically to max, so 384kHz. Said math applies itself globally to all inputs. For lower rates, defeat Gryphon's own upsampler, then use resampling software like Audirvana, Pure Music, Leedh or similar to target your favorite rate. Next we see the two display modes of Ethos as CD player or DAC.
