Cantata - Gryphon Audio Designs

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EQUIPMENT REVIEW The Gryphon Cantata Loudspeaker by Roy Gregory Regardless of approach, there’s one great imponderable in loudspeaker design. Whether you’re working with sealed boxes or ported enclosures, dipolar panels or horn loading, sooner or later your creation will find its way into a room, and that room is the one thing you have absolutely no control over, particularly when it comes to low frequency performance. Indeed, the requirements of good mid-band performance and decent bass extension are so completely contradictory that it’s remarkable that loudspeakers work as well in the real world as they do. This isn’t exactly news, and accounts for the current fascination with (increasingly successful) sub-woofer design and the (as yet musically unsuccessful) DSP correction of low frequencies. It’s a topic that PM touches on in his column this month, musing on the practicalities of adjustable porting for loudspeakers. So far, each and every solution to the issue of room interfacing, be it the Alison wall-proximity designs, the various applications of DSP ranging from Meridian to Infinity and B&O, or the direct/reflected sound of the Bose 901, has thrown at least one musical baby out with the bath-water. Instead, careful positioning and a fortunate match have generally delivered the best results, with the serious caveat that the lower you go the harder it gets to get it right. And the bigger the speaker gets as well. Now Gryphon have taken a new look at an old idea, addressing some of the historical shortcomings along the way. One of the great advantages of active drive in a loudspeaker (or sub-woofer) is that you compensate electrically for the mechanical limitations of your driver/cabinet combination. It’s the reason that Meridian have always managed to extract such wide bandwidth from their modestly dimensioned interactive designs, from the M2 onwards. Various people over the years have applied electrical correction of low frequencies to otherwise passive designs in an effort to extend their low-frequency performance. Bose did it with the 901, but perhaps the best known incarnation was KEF’s Qube equalisers, supplied with the Reference Series 15 or so years ago. These set a small, active bass contour between the pre and power amps, allowing the user to tailor the low frequency extension. It’s an elegant solution, but it’s also fraught with problems, the chief one being the quality of the electronics themselves. The small boxes with their plastic controls and wall-wart power supplies were never going to go down well with the audiophile audience. Given its position in the system, any such equaliser needs to be built as well as the line-stage that’s feeding it. Well, with the Cantata, Gryphon have adopted exactly the same overall approach, except that they have engineered their Q Controller to exactly the same standards as their £8000 Sonata pre-amp. As well as quality components, power supply and casework, you get fully balanced or single-ended connection, and an array of front panel switches. These allow you to mute or bypass the unit as well as allowing you to select one of three factory set bass contours. There’s also a fourth switch to allow a custom contour to be fitted, user specified but built by Gryphon. The purpose of the contours is to match the low frequency characteristics of the speaker to those of the room, its roll-off to the room’s inherent low frequency gain. They should extend the system’s bass resonance point from around 57Hz to around a rather healthy 35Hz, especially given the relatively slim enclosure used. In so doing you alter the speaker’s Q, hence the terminology: what you’re actually trying to do is align the Q of the speaker with the Q of the room. There’s one other peculiarity with the Cantata. The Q Controller is also connected to each speaker by a thin, grey cable attached with a multi-pin plug. This carries 28V DC that is used to bias the capacitors in the speaker’s crossover, long held in some quarters to offer significant sonic advantages. The speaker itself is of relatively modest dimensions, employing two 125mm fibre-glass coned bass-mid drivers, tilted and symmetrically deposed around the centrally located, 25mm doped fabric tweeter. The drivers were developed specifically for the Cantata in conjunction with a well-known Scandinavian manufacturer. All feature substantial motor assemblies, the tweeter’s being oil cooled. The cabinet is massively braced, and considerable care has gone into the contouring of the baffle and driver surrounds. The tweeter is mounted on the back of its own carefully sculpted sub-baffle, itself carved from a solid, 1Kg block of aluminium. The crossover is hardwired and constructed from hand-built components. The air-cored inductors, wound from copper foil and wax 91
EQUIPMENT REVIEW impregnated are the work of Steen Duelund, as are the stacked foil capacitors, potted in epoxy to resist mechanical interference. The speaker cabinet is mounted to the leading edge of the dedicated aerofoil section stand. This has dimpled aluminium side panels, coupled to extruded alloy leading and trailing edges that provide a textural contrast to the solid methacrylate end plates that top and tail the whole assembly. The stand contains the crossover, isolating it from the mechanical interference of the drive-units. The speaker cabinet is part wrapped in Nappa hide, part with brushed and anodised aluminium panels. The black finish sent for review is standard, but there are a host of colour and material options for a slightly less monolithic appearance. The base plate of the Cantata carries an inset panel that mounts a single pair of solid copper binding posts and a small, multi-pin connector for the Q controller. The rear edge is cut away to accept the solid aluminium cross member and its two hard rubber feet. The front edge is tapped to take a single composite cone, designed to level the speaker and act as a mechanical ground for the cabinet. The front tip of the baseplate also contains a recessed red LED that gives you muted confirmation of the status of the active circuitry. Along with the Cantatas, Gryphon also supplied their Sonata line-stage and massive Antileon power-amp, as well as a complete set of cables. It’s an imposing set-up when it’s all stacked together. I ran the Cantatas in the context of this complete system, but also with the Hovland HP100/RADIA combination. Sources were the Classe Omega SACD, Wadia 861 and the Clearaudio Master Reference/Groove record player. Set-up instructions for the speakers are extremely precise as regards positioning, the final outcome agreeing almost exactly with my generally preferred location, and once level they were toed in to point directly at the listener. What can I tell you about the Cantatas’ sound? Well, that’s an interesting question, and not just because of the variables inherent in their design. Indeed, the Q Controller is simplicity itself in operation, and the correct setting was immediately apparent. If you need help deciding which setting suits your room then you’ve probably already spent too much on hi-fi! What’s more, experiments with and without the Q Controller in the system, as well as with its own Bypass switch quickly established its wholly positive influence. If there was any loss of information, transparency or fine detail with it in circuit then I couldn’t detect it. The upside of using it was a dramatic increase in dimensionality, freedom in the bass, general presence and focus. It was if the whole performance suddenly locked together and hit the groove. Both the band and the music took on a new sense of substance and purpose. Gryphon certainly seem to have maximised the benefits of their chosen approach whilst avoiding the major pitfalls that have marred past attempts. Having said that, the Cantata isn’t exactly cheap and the Q Controller presumably represents a significant proportion of the cost. But then, if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and the results literally speak for themselves. The other slightly contentious element in the Cantata is the biasing of its crossover capacitors. Once again the case is easily proved – simply disconnect the cables. Do so and the speaker will sound initially quicker and more transparent, if a little leaner. But reconnect the bias cables and the gain in substance, colour and image coherence is too significant to miss. Once again, Gryphon seem to have got their sums right. So, given that the technology works, how does it leave the speaker sounding? In the best tradition of high-quality, compact twoway speakers, that’s a hard one to pin down. Play with the Cantatas and a house full of equipment for a few weeks and the first thing you learn is that these are the closest thing to sonic chameleons you’re ever likely to come across. The second is that whatever limitations you detect are more likely to be down to the partnering equipment than the speakers them-selves. Every time I thought I’d finally put my finger on the nature of the beast, 92
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Cantata - Gryphon Audio Designs

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