New Gryphon Audio Commander Preamplifier

Since Gryphon’s founding nearly 40 years ago, our philosophy has remained constant: the relentless pursuit of sonic perfection without commercial compromises in design, construction or cost.  

All Gryphon products have been conceived in this same perfectionist spirit: uncompromising engineering in the service of music, impeccable build quality complemented by our original, “Nordic Noir” aesthetic sensibility and simplicity of use. The culmination of Gryphon’s four decades of philosophies, design goals and engineering expertise are fully realized in Commander: the world’s most advanced preamplifier.
Launch point for Commander was our extraordinary Pandora, widely regarded as one of the world’s best preamplifiers. Commander shares Pandora’s Dual-Mono layout with separate chassis for signal and power supply circuitry. Pandora’s single- ended Class A input buffer is retained, as it offers the advantage of passing the signal through the smallest possible number of electrical components–two transistors and a single resistor–yielding sound that is exceptionally transparent, fast, natural and open. Both preamplifiers employ zero global negative feedback.

Commander embodies major advances in many sonically-critical areas, including a high- precision, extremely low noise voltage reference in connection with the analogue series regulators which supply the amplifier stages. The Commander’s voltage reference has approximately 50 times lower noise than the already-excellent reference used in Pandora. 
A pair of fully discrete, linear power supplies feed each channel’s analog circuit while a third is dedicated to the digital control circuitry, thus maintaining absolute mechanical separation and electrical isolation between digital and analog sections.
The distinctive finish of the Gryphon Commander suggests the authority and vitality of its music reproduction, which sets new standards in timing, bass control, dynamic expansion, and transparency. Housed in two massive chassis, Commander’s power supply includes four custom- made toroidal transformers—two per stereo channel—engineered for minimal noise. Two of these (one per channel) power the dual-mono preamplifier circuits while the second pair are reserved for upcoming Gryphon source components, thereby ensuring a future-proof upgrade path.
Extensive use of aluminum chassis components yields a highly stable, non-resonant enclosure that minimizes both mechanical and electrical degradation and provides optimal working conditions for Commander’s circuitry. Unique to Commander, a constrained-layer-damped bottom plate—a “Sandwich” of three individual layers of Kerrock®, bitumen and stainless steel—reduces resonances to an absolute minimum. All amplifier and analogue power supply circuit boards float above these bottom plates on specially-designed isolators, providing a pristine, virtually vibration- free environment for Commander’s sensitive circuitry.
An extra-thick, 4mm glass window presents Commander’s 4.3” TFT capacitive touch display, designed to ensure an utterly intuitive user interface. Customized system set-up is facilitated by extensive Commander menu control of such functions as start-up level, left/right channel balance, maximum volume level, source level matching, input naming, display brightness (including Auto Dim On/Off), dedicated AV-throughput for integration with Home Theater systems, output level and Green Bias adjustment for use with Gryphon power amplifiers. In a unique design flourish, Commander’s display changes with the listener’s distance from the system; in this way, Volume and other settings remain uniformly readable regardless of the listening position.