This is a review written by Terry Ellis December 2024.

For my video review please see my YouTube channel link here

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Competing with oneself 

I tried to put myself in the shoes of the very high end HiFi manufacturer Gryphon Audio who have an established integrated amplifier that a lot of people feel is the best of its kind in the whole world. Despite its very high price they have sold loads of them. So the big question is why would they create a new amplifier to replace it and how could they make it better?  That has been at the back of my mind for the whole time the Gryphon Diablo 333 has been here and this has not been an easy review.

Gryphon who?
If you are an audiophile who is new to Gryphon products I should warn you they are very much HiFi on a crazy kind of level. Crazy big, crazy powerful, really crazy heavy and expensive, very expensive. But let me also tell you that Gryphon make HiFi products that I want to say get under your skin but I know that’s an intended derogatory phrase, I don’t mean it like that. I mean its HiFi that has a build and sound with such distinction it can makes someone say “I am a Gryphon audiophile and I have no interest in any of the many other HiFi brands.” I say this because I know audiophiles like that and every Gryphon has or does something that little bit extra special that makes it stand out.

But if you asked me to explain the Gryphon “house sound” I would struggle because I think there are different Gryphon sounds. I cannot claim to be an expert but from what I have heard some Gryphon amplifiers sounds fast and clear and really “grrrrr” authoritative like the Essence Pre Power I had here to review earlier in the year, especially true in its pure Class A mode. Other Gryphon’s like the Diablo 120 or my dream power amplifier the Antileon Evo can have a really thick and chewy warm lush loveliness about their sound that does something special to vocals

So where in this sound range does the Diablo 333 sit and how does it compare to the Diablo 300 the Integrated it replaces, the amplifier that was the ‘best integrated” I referred to in the intro paragraph.

Its big, really BIG

Lets start at the beginning the Diablo 333 is a £24,500 integrated amplifier that weighs over 50Kg and let me tell you now you think you are strong until you try and pick this amplifier up. Its heavy like Thors hammer, you think you have it but it just wont budge, you have to be worthy of it. Looking inside shows you partially why its so heavy.  It’s a true dual mono design with craziness of everything such as being loaded with huge capacitors, dual mono Holmgren toroidal transformers, there are thick copper traces on the very high spec circuit boards and it uses ten output transistors per channel. It really is just awesome nuts on every level. But somehow this time Gryphon have managed to modernise the industrial design to make the 333 look sleek but still “beefcake” with the enormous heat sinks that are just crazy but I love them.

The 333 is noticeably larger than the Diablo 300 and much heavier and it looks more like the bigger amplifier up the range rather than a like for like replacement. The power on offer here is extreme for an integrated with 2 x 333 watts into 8 ohms, 666 into 4 ohms and 1100 into 2ohms so super impressive power scaling. While this seems excessive its not because you still turn the volume the same as other amplifiers but the reason for the power and the massive everything is so that none of it is ever really being stressing too much which is great for long life spans and sound too of course.  It also makes the 333 very versatile for demanding speaker loads.

But none of this answers the question of what Gryphon this is for its sound but there are two clues.  One is the front aesthetic and the screen, both very much resemble Gryphon’s flagship products such as the Apex amplifier which is crazy personified but everyone loves them and the Commander preamplifier.  There is a clue inside, the 333 borrows some trickle down technology from the £100,000 Apex, it uses the same output transistors and that is obviously huge here and I think really dictates what Gryphon sound the 333 has, but just hold that thought for a minute.

On the rear I have always loved Gryphon amplifiers for how well laid out and spaced out all the connections are, they dont ever trigger my OCD. The 333 is a little nicer on the rear compared to the 300 and maybe a little more modern. But it also feels  more congested because there are now two bays that can have both a DAC and a phono stage module installed.  With the 300 you could have both installed but not in such an elegant manner.

This 333 had the phono stage installed on my request because Gryphon’s Rune Skov told me it’s supposed to be a little bit special because its designed like a mini Legato Legacy phono stage and that is very high end £15k Gryphon design. In typical Gryphon fashion this phono is fully balanced and dual mono which is very impressive for a phono stage built into an amplifier.

The phono has balanced input only which of course makes sense but that did require me to get a different tonearm cable to use with it.  There are dip switches to select your cartridge loading from 20 to 1600 with 15 different options to choose between which seems like a lot to me and great.  Then in the 333 menu you select between MM and MC and the values are set for MM at 42db gain 47Kohms of course and 220 capacitance. For Moving coil there is 64db of gain which is a great middle ground I feel.  But this is not a cheap phono stage to have added as it costs just shy of £5000 so my expectations were very high.

But still none of this tells us which Gryphon sound the 333 has, so I put my back out more than once testing and comparing it to Diablo 300 and I can tell you now the 333 has a new Gryphon sound.

The BIG comparison

Maybe new was the wrong word to use but you might expect the 333 to sound simply incrementally better than the 300 it replaces as we normally get, but that is not it.  What Gryphon have done with the 333 is make it give you more music than the 300 which sounds ridiculous but let me try and explain this.

The Diablo 300 is an amazing amplifier for giving you a big scale of sound, with focused musical images in a very clear sound stage. The vocals are clear and sound big, as does the bass and the sound is full of energy and life. The music is always separated and organised and you can focus your attention on any one thing because everything in the music is presented separated and clear like you can hear all the musicians all doing their own thing exceptionally well. What the 333 does is take that musical picture and enhances it to be a much larger sound field or sound stage, that seems to have far more harmonic information going on surrounding the main musical elements.  This knits the individual parts of the music together better to create a larger and more musically developed overall sound stage and sound field. So music goes from being all the about the individual things to being more about the music as a whole and to me this is more tube amplifier like where you have a lot of harmonics to the music and in a comparison solid state amps often sound like this is missing.  So that is a big difference between the 300 and 333.

But its not the only big change, you notice straight away that the 333 sounds slightly softer with a noticeably greater sense of ease in mids and highs so less shout music at you compared to the 300.  The 333 offers up a little bit of sweetness in the music but take the word sweetness with a grain of salt as this is still a Gryphon, Gryphon’s generally have a more raw energetic sound to them and that is still true here being a zero global negative feedback design. What I think I was hearing as the difference between the 300 and 333 is the 333’s combination of a cleaner delivery that is also more linear, so is there less that “stands out” in its sound combined with the extra harmonics in the music creating the overall benefit of this just taking the edge off the music in a very nice and pleasing way.

But the 333 is still an absolute power house monster that sounds incredibly dynamic but more chilled with it too, like the monster is more in control of its behaviour, or really the speakers behaviour. This is normally the difference you might expect get going from an integrated to a pre power or maybe even pre and dual mono blocks, that is how much difference I experienced between the Diablo 300 and 333.

Do the speakers matter?

I think Diablo 333 is the more transparent amplifier, it seems to show more of what the speakers can do for good or for bad. It seems to have less of its own sound again compared to the 300 that I think has a fairly distinct sonic character you hear combined with the speaker and sometimes this combo is just great.  I wanted to test this so I compared both amplifiers with three totally different speakers. This was a ton of work, literally.

First up was the Estelon AURA and the 333 gave me the more pleasing sound with them. Smoother in the vocals and bigger and more full in the bass combined with a clearer insight into just how three dimensional and pin point the AURA’s imaging is. I think the 333 was the better amplifier with the AURA and I dont think the 300 was the perfect amplifier with them, they need more tonal colour from the amp. The AURA are also very demanding speakers with as low as 2 ohm and below impedance dips. This amplifier comparison with these speakers showed me that the 333 handled that demanding load better or at least that is how it sounded to me. I can also say the 333 is capable of sounding crystal clear and squeaky clean and it can create ultra precise holographic musical images in a fully three dimensional sound field as good as any amplifier I have tested to date.

Next up were my SVS Ultra Evolution Titan speakers and this test was totally different. The 333 was not the better amplifier with these speakers, the 300 sounded better. That is because the 333 showed me all the good things about the Titan but also their big limitations. The Titan has a very laid back mid range character, almost old fashioned in this regard with a bit of bloom on their big bass.  The 333 did not present the vocal details very clearly because the Titan’s very big bass was sounding too thick and was congesting and suffocating the clarity some.  I think the 333 was driving the Titan too well which seems crazy to say but that is how I heard it.  Instead the 300 with its strength of focusing on the individual musical images more and separating the music into individual parts making music more about the individual details and slightly more forward mids and highs worked great with the Titan, just great. You could say the pros of one balanced the cons of the other creating a great synergy and this was a great setup to listen to.

This was an important test as it showed to me that in some situations or with some speakers an individuals preference might still be the 300 over the 333 which is another sign of how different they are.  However I think its likely to be isolated cases based on the next speaker test.  Lastly I tested both amplifiers with the Audio Solutions Figaro M2 speakers, these also have a smooth and laid back character of sound that perfectly fits the Diablo 300. I was loving the sound of the Figaro speakers with the 300, loving it actually but the whole time I was listening to them I could hear where I thought the 333 would take these excellent speakers up several gears but of course I didn’t know until I tried it.

So I tested the 333 with them and five hours later I was still listening to a whole variety of streamed music, loads of CD’s on the Cyrus CD40 stack and a number of records on the Origin Live Calypso turntable with the Sumiko Starling cartridge. This was the listening session where the 333 made its biggest mark on me, because the sound I was getting in my room was very similar to earlier in the year when I had the 333 here with the German Physiks Borderland MK IV speakers. The sound I thought was the best HiFi sound I had ever had in my listening room.

What surprised me about this was Audio Solutions Figaro M2 are roughly £11,000 speakers with the specification I had here so to get a sound very close to the what I had previously from £30,000 speakers, while doing some do some other things exceptionally well too is a huge deal. I love the Figaro speakers they sound immense when being driven by an extremely good amplifier such as the 333. The Gryphon could get so much out of them in terms of a stunning vocal character with a lovely textured quality that was very smooth and full in tone with a realistic timbre while still being energetic and lively combined with a big full sound with powerful bass that was not smothering of any of the small details. The Figaro bass sounded bigger and more from the 333 but still very tight and full room size in scale underpinning the whole music so well and not many amps do bass like the 333, not even the mighty 300.

The bass from the 333 is just immense for being big and bold and round and pleasing, it can change its pitch lightning fast and it can stay super agile and detailed or fast finger plucking while punching you all that the same time and the Audio Solutions do most of that superbly well.  I feel the 333 got a lot out of the Figaro speakers but there was still a lot more in the amplifiers tank to go bigger and hit harder with even bigger speakers.

Do records sound good?

I of course need to speak about the built in phono stage sound quality and I am not the most experienced person to speak on this, however when I dropped the stylus on the record and sat down to listen I was very pleasantly surprised by the lively upbeat, very dynamic sound of the different records and I listened to.  I tested a bunch of different genre starting with some modern electronic moving to some very audiophile cliche pressings such as Dire Straights by Mofi. I also tested some less than perfect records I bought from Ebay such as like UB40’s greatest hits and it didn’t matter really, all of it was a fun, lively, engaging listen with really good bass and I didn’t have to crank the volume to get the sound level to match my digital setup. The phono stage MC gain seemed spot on.

I could hear some record noise in between tracks as you would expect but as soon as music started that melted away and I liked that I was not being distracted by any minor record noise and that is why I like the Origin Live turntable setup so much. Its a very nicely balanced turntable setup and with the Gryphon as phono and amplifier I could enjoy a wide variety of music and enjoy it for what makes listening to vinyl unique and special.  I think some will still prefer an external phono over whats built in to the 333, however if you prefer the convenience have confidence that you can get a great result.

Negatives big or small?

I think there are three very obvious negatives with the Diablo 333 that could be seen as big or small, depending.  The 333 is very big and exceptionally heavy for an integrated so its unlikely to fit into your average TV furniture. It runs pretty warm if you are cranking the volume or on a hot summers day you will likely notice the heat, depending of course. Lastly is the price because the 333 is very expensive even by high end HiFi standards. That makes it very much exclusive level HiFi and sadly not for everyone including me. But it is possible to look at it in reverse, if you purchases one in your 50’s you could easily still be marvelling in what it does until your last day. So maybe over that long haul time frame you could see some great value for money spent here, but again its not for everyone.

Final thoughts

The Diablo 333 is an amazing integrated amplifier but you take that as given with it being a Gryphon and with the exceptionally high price tag. I think most importantly for me to stress here is that this is also a “new” Gryphon sound that I think is looking to combine the best of the two different Gryphon sounds I mentioned at the start of the review. Combining tons of typical Gryphon power, authority and control but with a fullness and smoothness and graceful ease that is more musical and more pleasing than what you might be used to from a Gryphon.  You also get much more music too, more of the music’s harmonics similar to what we love about very good tube gear.  Not the same of course but of that ilk, but big and powerful with real big solid state muscle and its bloody glorious it really is.

I think the 333 is different enough that if the 300 was not the one with your speakers the 333 could totally change your mind about Gryphon amplifiers. I do feel sad the 300 is being retired, its still a fantastic amplifier and it’s a shame the 300 can’t continue as the smaller brother to the 333, like the 120 was to the 300. Only Gryphon know the financials of making something like that happen. The 333 very obviously takes things on in some key and specific sonic areas and looks cooler too.

If I had the money today the 333 would be staying here regardless of how much my back hurts from moving it around to complete this review. This was not as easy review for me and having it taken away now the review is finished is even more difficult.

A Special Performer Award is Pursuit Perfect Systems highest accolade and is in recognition of exceptional product performance regardless of price

For the full specification of the Gryphon Diablo 333 Integrated amplifier see their website linked here