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"It means that relative phase—phase-matched behavior between multiple drivers—is senior in import to absolute phase. Human hearing is far less sensitive to phase shift in the absolute domain but highly sensitive to different phase shifts in different drivers. Steen Duelund called the crossover necessary to achieve inter-driver phase consistency the synchronous filter. On why the Mojo embraces an AMT, in my opinion there are no universally great tweeters that work to full potential in all applications. In too may cases one finds a fashionable tweeter forced into a system with lots of correcting/compensating components in the crossover and performance loss as a result. Tweeters are often the stars on stage and historically know for all kinds of interesting concepts from ion and plasma to ribbons, diamond dust and other exotic materials. Many of them are  extremely interesting on their own but often fail miserably when asked to interact with others. Hence our choice of tweeter depends entirely on the specific speaker and how well it can be implemented without 'brute force'. In the case of the Mojo the AMT was just perfect. With the Atlantis is was a poor choice but still a great tweeter.

"The Mojo's reflex system is tuned to 52Hz but due to a flow resistor in the mouth of each port their contributions are a bit more damped than most other such systems. This gets an alignment which best suits us. As you may know we prefer closed boxes in our bigger systems. Mojo's front baffle consists of three different angled sections up to 34mm thick which attach to a 22mm sub baffle. These front and secondary baffles are separated by a rubber gasket which simultaneously seals around the drive units to eliminate air leaks. The baffles are connected only via bolts and rubber rings to minimize vibration transmission. The rear of the cabinet is another two-layer affair, here aluminum and MDF. The crossover is strategically placed inside to help break up internal standing waves. The inside side panels are damped with bitumen and the tweeter's own chamber is critically damped with a mixture of felt and wool.

"Obviously a 4th-order filter rotates phase by 360°. When we say that our speakers are in perfect phase we mean that the drivers maintain the same relative phase across all frequencies. To us this is extremely important and one of the keys to achieving the best sound from any loudspeaker system. Contrary to a measuring microphone which only detects the summed signal, the ear can easily detect phase offsets between drivers. For coherence it's crucial to align the units otherwise you only hit your goal around a certain frequency. The drivers naturally undergo phase rotation when they roll off at LF and HF but here the other unit is so low in output that it gets masked."

As any other successful company must particularly when selling exclusively priced goods, GAD had to build its own mystique. Call it spin instead. Now it'd be convenient to write off Gryphon's speaker claims as a fancy cover for branching out from their core competency to pursue greater market share. Alas—conveniently while we're at—this overlooks that their original speaker project was never intended to go commercial. It was a visiting German reviewer's indiscretion upon spotting something in the rafters during a Gryphon demo. He asked to hear it. Under strict reminders about these transducers being raw prototypes for development purposes of their electronics only, he was reluctantly accommodated. This gent with his connections then leaked word. The Danes held something back of great import and apparently just for their own jollification. That's how Project 30 was eventually steam-rolled into going commercial. The original Cantata was the first offspring.

Flemming's Project 30 speaker collaboration with Steen had been wildly exploratory, entirely impractical, tweaky as sin and prohibitively expensive to duplicate en masse. It involved transducers of their own making, custom crossover parts and sundry. When the call arose and requests turned demand, custom collaborations with ScanSpeak, Jensen and Mundorf managed to replicate certain of the duo's core DIY parts as formal production items. Today's Duelund Coherent Audio with its no-compromise capacitors and resistors is not merely another Steen legacy. It's also ongoing Gryphon collaborator and partner in crime. Gryphon the speaker house is thus rather more than a cheap double dip. And why ever would Rasmussen risk a perfectly splendid and hard-won reputation as a top hifi electronics brand by adding me-too products to his catalogue? Just because? It wouldn't make any sense. As he's proud to put it, "we sell stuff to finance our own R&D. That's what we're most passionate about - furthering the state of the art."

It probably explains his commercial success in a sector that's notoriously dismissive of amplifier firms which reinvent themselves as loudspeaker houses. Krell certainly never really managed under D'Agostino's stewartship. Nor did Linn or Naim (the latter's ascendant on that count could be on the rise however). Cary utterly failed. The reverse is equally true. One doubts for example that Kharma sells many of its own amplifiers outside a very narrow circle of groupies. Mårten Design is the latest one to give it a go. For a brand to do electronics and speakers equally well and be openly acknowledged as such is a tightrope act only a few don't fall from (mbl comes to mind). For the long story on this you best peruse Gryphon's website and their €100 coffee table book which details the company's history in full.

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