This is a review written by Terry Ellis February 2023.

For my video review please see my YouTube channel link here

Overview

The Gryphon Audio EOS2 are one of the nicest-looking speakers I have ever had in my listening room. The review sample was in red, which won’t be everyone’s taste, but I really like it.  After living with the EOS2 for a couple of months they are definitely not the speakers I thought they were going to be.

Gryphon make awesome, aspirational HiFi products which are generally very large. A lot of people who have smaller or even medium sized rooms might find Gryphon HiFi ownership comes with a cost to some space convenience, but we happily trade this for the love of the products, I am sure you all know that feeling in one way or another.

Normally you would also have to find even more space for some huge speakers placed out into the room, which is totally impractical for a lot of people, especially in smaller rooms, but again we do it because we love it. This is not the case with the EOS2, they are designed with real world convenience in mind as they are designed to be placed close to the front wall, 30cm close, and yet they still deliver the big, bold, Gryphon sound, but with a bit of a twist.

In the flesh you might doubt a speaker of this size and type could create a big bold sound. I would have agreed had I not heard them last year playing in a large room at a HiFi dealer event. It was jaw-dropping just how large they sounded, but not large in a blasted-at-you horrible kind of way, but a big sound and controlled, smooth, and rich way. The performance the EOS2s were capable of that day genuinely surprised not only me but everyone who was at the event.  The review pair I have are those exact same speakers, and I will be the first to admit I have not been able to achieve the same sound from them in my room, better in some ways but, in the main, not nearly as good. However this was a great benchmark for me to try and recreate and I cannot take that demo into account for this review as that would not be right or fair, but of course it showed some of the capabilities and it would have been wrong not to ,mention them,

Soundstage – 1

I want to firstly talk about HiFi system soundstage in general. Placing a speaker very close to the front wall is contradictaory to what we are preconditioned as audiophiles to think as good speaker placement.  I started with this mindset too and initially I setup the EOS2 in the usual spot in my room using, but I wasnt happy and I didn’t like their sound in that position. I had to totally go against my instincts, in that the closer I placed the EOS2 to the front wall the better they sounded and this messed with my head and took some accepting.

I think the reason we often pull speakers away from the wall is to get the best soundstage. If you are lucky and have the space to pull your speakers out into the room, say 1.5 metres, and that gives you a wonderful soundstage that goes both beyond and forward of the speakers to create a wonderful three dimensional image I bet you are very happy. But would it really matter, or make any difference to you if the speakers were placed against the wall and they still gave you a sound with a similar three dimensional soundstage? When you look at it in very simple terms you would probably say no, I don’t care.  In practice I think there was an audible difference, well at least in in my room but it wasn’t an easy case of one being outright better than the other –  there are pros and cons to both.

What I think is important to stress is that the EOS2 are designed to be placed closed to the front wall and still give you a big three dimensional soundstage with depth and layering so you are not being penalised for placing them against the wall, in fact you are rewarded for it.  You can have your convenience cake and eat it.

Design

When you look at the EOS2, the first thing you notice is their shape, which is a unique cacophony of angles. This is on purpose so that the speakers themselves act as a sound diffusor. This is beneficial for smaller rooms where the is a lot of reflected sound waves that inevitably will be hitting them and I cant help but love that attention to detail.  This is mirrored on the inside where the cabinet shape helps to prevent standing waves.

I also love the visual contrasts of the baffle colour, shape, and its contouring, plus the stand, which is quite large, but forms an integral part of the speaker’s design. There are, what I call guitar strings covering the baffle. This is a Gryphon design cue, and it does a good job of making dust harder to see on the dark coloured baffle. Visually the EOS2 are stunning looking speakers, further enhanced with a car-quality paint finish.

The EOS2 are a two-way design which features a 1.34-inch beryllium dome tweeter, so larger than typical tweeter, with quite a low crossover point of 2.2khz.  The tweeter is paired to a TPCD thin-ply carbon diaphragm mid-bass driver which Gryphon have had custom made.  You see this type of driver being used by other manufacturers, but Gryphon employs a unique device they call the Impulse Optimiser Ring which is designed to strengthen the bond between the voice coil and cone in order to improve the impulse (speed) behaviour of the driver, allowing it to keep up with the beryllium tweeter.

Although I was sent a photo of the crossover, I don’t know too much about it other than it sits in a chamber at the base of the speaker. The base and legs are all made from a specific anti resonant material called Kerrock, which is in three-layer sandwich with bitumen and steel. Gryphon use it in key places for their other products, such as isolating the circuit boards in their new flagship commander preamplifier.

There are two very important features with these speakers which again evidences that they have been designed with real world convenience in mind. Firstly they can be adjusted to be either front or rear ported for bass. This is achieved by unscrewing the guitar strings grille mechanism, unscrewing the cover for the port, make the change and screw everything back together again. The change takes about 20 minutes and is something you can easily do at home.  This will be a big feature for a lot of owners, enabling them to get the best bass for their room, I found more bass rear-ported and less bass front-ported. I find this to be a much better solution than using bungs in a port. Secondly, on the rear of the speaker is a selector for three UHF modes for the tweeter. They were explained to me as follows: Tweeter Mode 1 is what is suggested if you have the system setup in a perfect equilateral triangle, taking into account these are speakers designed to be setup mostly straight on, with a very minimal toe in of up to about 4 degrees. Tweeter Mode 2 is if you have a larger listening area. It’s a slight compromise for the sweet spot but better over a larger area, and Tweeter Mode 3 is if the speakers have to be very close to a side wall.

My take on the treble modes were 1 is the most ‘brilliant’ sounding, 2 is smoother and rolled off a little and 3 is more rolled off again. Mode 3 worked best for me in my room, and as you can see in the photos the EOS2 were placed extremely close to a side wall.  Mode 3 made all the difference for how the EOS2 sounded so this is an excellent feature that works.

System Synergy

I think it stands to reason that Gryphon have designed the EOS2 to be used with their own electronics and cables, in fact the cables used internally are the same as you would buy from them.  I didnt have any other Gryphon gear to partner with the speakers and quickly found that the EOS2 are quite brutally honest speakers, which demand very good electronics.

Very good doesn’t have to mean crazy expensive. Given the EOS2’s 96db efficiency and their relatively easy impedance load on the amplifier, I was able to get some very good results using an NAD M10 V2. This represented a modern, simple, high performing HiFi system thats infinitely enjoyable to listen to however with this setup you wouldn’t really be getting your full money’s worth from the EOS2, and I knew they could do much more. I tried all manner of digital sources and amplification and, with each improvement in peripherals, the EOS2s kept scaling up their sound quality. Their brutal honesty showed me what the gear was doing for good and for bad.

I think I preferred the EOS using electronics with a slightly richer, more treble rounded sound as opposed to them being ultra-neutral precise and clear.  I think you could also get some great results with some tube gear, but there are many solid state amplifiers and digital front ends which could work great here too but some that won’t. I enjoyed a pleasing scale of sound with great authority using them with an Auralic Altair G2.1 and the NAD M23 power amplifier, a very simple system but, in some ways, I preferred the EOS2 with the even more muscular sounding McIntosh MA9500.

I think the sum up of my experience is that it’s not too difficult, or expensive, to get very good results from the EOS2 but, to get the most from them will take some seriously good kit.

Sound Quality

If you are new to Gryphon, one thing they often say is that if you are spending their kind of money on a HiFi system you should be able to enjoy your whole music collection not just a small selection. For me, listening to different Gryphon products, some sound quite warm and rich and some more authoritative and honest/neutral. Overall, there is an easy-going character to Gryphon HiFi and even the biggest Gryphon Kodo speaker system, which has about twenty bass and mid bass drivers, only has two tweeters, so whilst they sound huge they are also super smooth.

For me the EOS2 do this too but add a bit of a twist. The first words which come into my mind when I think about how the EOS2s sound is scale, energy, and speed. The sound just really wants to get out of them which feels different compared to a lot of other speakers. These are not your pipe-and-slipper or an a-typical Danish relaxed sounding speaker, these are a speaker that are on the front foot, delivering music with energy, clarity and dynamics.

The treble has a very lively character, a very large beryllium tweeter I think will do that. The high frequency clarity is exceptional. It is snappy, present and detailed and, a word I don’t use often in reviews, it has intricacy.  However, with the wrong system components it could be too much of a good thing and as I mentioned earlier, I selected UHF mode 3, otherwise the treble could be too much. But get the component balance right and the treble has a nice combination of lively detailed intricate and smooth.

At the other end of scale, the bass from them is fantastic. For me front wall placement is also corner placement, which normally means bass ‘boom city’, but not so for the EOS2. Their bass was big, bold, solid, fast, energetic and detailed, once I changed them to front-ported, no boom at all. The EOS2 delivered a supremely satisfying bass for quantity, quality and extension although this aspect of their performance was very much affected by the amplifier and the NAD M23 was my favourite here.

For vocals delivery, the McIntosh was my preferred amplifier, but I was left hankering after a big Gryphon Class A amp. The vocals delivery I heard from the EOS2 at the HiFi dealer event was outstanding for its sweetness and smooth organic character. I was achieving great vocals here with more outright resolution but I couldn’t match that same character. Some of this difference was probably down to my room too, but likely more the fact that my system did not have Gryphon amplification, and cost about a quarter of that used on the demo day. My take away is that the EOS2 can reproduce vocals with real soul, character and authenticity, together with great resolution and clarity, you just need the right system to get it all.

Soundstage – 2

The EOS2 deliver a soundstage with a great size and scale to everything.  Not oversized, just big and therefore I feel more authentic.  This is where my small room was, without doubt, holding the EOS2s back, because there is only so big things can sound in here. What stood out to me most is the three-dimensional holography, it is different to other HiFi speakers pulled out into the room as they were imaging mostly forwards of themselves of course, but with the right partnering equipment, as I mentioned before it was still three dimensional with fantastic layering and depth filling my room, filling the usual soundstage space and beyond at times. I noticed the layering capability mostly with vocals of the singers in Schack Matt by Riltons Vanner, the scale of each vocalist in my room was so big you wouldn’t think layering would be possible within the limited space. However, there was a clearly defined soundstage with nice depth layers, as opposed to sound being flat against the front wall. To me this is a stand-out sonic characteristic of the EOS2, because they sound very close to how very good speakers sound placed out in the room, but with some benefits of their own which is pretty remarkable when you think about it.

Price and Competition

This Gryphon awesomeness is going to cost you, £22,500, which is a lot of money for HiFi speakers. As I wrote at the start of this review, Gryphon is an aspirational HiFi brand for most of us.  I could not do any worthwhile comparison with other speakers as these are the only speakers I have ever reviewed designed to to placed close to the wall, and doing so with other speakers not designed for that would be a pointless and an unfair comparison.

For price, the closest competitors I can think of are the Wilson Audio Sabrina X (£24,998) and YG Acoustics Carmel 2 (£27,000), both similar in stature and both costing significantly more. I haven’t listened to the Wilsons so I cannot comment. However I have listened to the YG many times, but not side by side with the EOS2s so it would, again, be wrong of me to make any direct comparison. Nevertheless, the EOS2s have some obvious strengths which could easily may make the better speakers for you all factors taken into account, most notably again being price.

Final Thoughts

This has been a long review and I felt that the Gryphon EOS2, being such a special speaker, warranted it.  If you position your speakers close to your front wall, either by choice or from necessity, the EOS2 are likely to be one of the best speakers you can buy for a smaller rooms.  Small is very much a relative term here though, they are speakers totally suitable for reasonable sized listening rooms too but my room is as small as you ever want to go with them, a bigger room would be far better.

The more important question is are they good enough to convert audiophiles from having speakers placed out in the room when it is totally inconvenient and impractical. I think this will be a resounding ‘yes’ for some audiophiles, not all of course, but I must admit, even in a dedicated listening room, I cannot deny how much nicer it is to have the extra space from not having the speakers in the way.  I think this will be especially true for those audiophiles who cant quite have the speakers far enough out into the room to really make a difference to sound stage, maybe they are better off going the other way, closer being better than not.

The Gryphon EOS2 should certainly worth a considered listen.

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 EOS2 please see their website linked here