In an age when most listeners have surrendered to streaming, Denmark’s Gryphon Audio Designs makes an unapologetic case for the compact disc — and asks US$39,000 for the privilege. The Ethos CD player is less a source component than a statement, pairing a sculptural chassis with engineering that borders on obsessive.
At its heart sit two 32-bit/768kHz ES9038PRO Sabre DAC chips, one dedicated to each channel. And these aren’t lone chips doing double duty: each houses eight individual DAC stages working in parallel, a brute-force approach to lowering noise and squeezing every last detail from the digital stream. It’s the kind of over-engineering that high-end audio lives for.
The disc itself is handled by a top-loading mechanism built around StreamUnlimited’s CD-Pro 8 transport — a nod to the tactile ritual that vinyl fans understand and streaming can never replicate. Drop a disc, watch the mechanism engage, and the Ethos gets to work.
Flexible digital plumbing. The Ethos is more than a CD spinner. Feed it externally and it will decode up to 32/384 PCM and DSD512 over USB, or up to 24/192 via AES/EBU or S/PDIF. Owners can also engage optional upsampling to 24/384 PCM or DSD128, and tailor the sound with a generous menu of digital filters — seven for PCM and three for DSD. That’s an unusual degree of hands-on control for a machine this expensive, and it invites the kind of fussy listening sessions its buyers no doubt relish.
Pure analog philosophy. On the output side, Gryphon stays true to form with a fully balanced Class-A analog stage running zero negative feedback. It’s a purist’s design choice — no correction loops smoothing things over, just a direct, unadorned signal path from conversion to output.
- Two 32-bit/768kHz ES9038PRO Sabre DAC chips (one per channel), eight DAC stages each
- Top-loading StreamUnlimited CD-Pro 8 transport
- USB: up to 32/384 PCM and DSD512
- AES/EBU and S/PDIF: up to 24/192
- Optional upsampling to 24/384 PCM or DSD128
- Seven PCM and three DSD digital filters
- Fully balanced Class-A output, zero negative feedback
The Ethos first appeared at AXPONA 2019 in Chicago and later at High End 2019 in Munich, and it has been on sale since. Years on, it remains a defiant reminder that for a certain kind of listener, the CD never really left — it just went upmarket.
