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Never before has so much intellectual horsepower been devoted to the service of Analog Playback. The culmination of a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between Soren Slebo of The Gryphon Design Team, Turntable Legend Helmut Brinkmann, Cartridge Master Ortofon and the Aarhus Technical Institute, Apollo by Gryphon is more than a turntable: it is a seminal event in the history of High End Audio.
Building the world’s finest analog playback system required the world’s most revered turntable designer: Helmut Brinkmann, the Stradivarius of turntable design. For more than four decades, Brinkmann turntables have been universally praised for their heirloom build quality, aesthetic beauty and most of all, their shockingly lifelike musical presentation. Helmut’s designs for his own company, while brilliant, have always been price constrained. With Apollo, he has had the opportunity to create his “Dream Turntable” without compromise.
Apollo utilizes two of Brinkmann’s proprietary, hand-built Sinus™ Belt Drive Motors placed at 180-degrees from each other, straddling the massive platter. While the benefits of multiple motors—increased torque, reduced “Cogging” effect and lower stress on each motor—are well-known, overcoming the potential problems of dual motor design required a great deal of ingenuity. Not only is Apollo Helmut’s first multi-motor turntable, it is also the first ‘table for which he developed a digital speed controller. Helmut has always considered speed control the “Secret Sauce” of turntable design and this unprecedented digital controller is his masterpiece. In addition to synchronizing the two motors, Apollo’s digital control is more accurate than analog equivalents and will never require calibration; at the same time, Brinkmann’s techniques for “Soft” motor control, painstakingly refined over more than 40 years of turntable design, further distance Apollo’s speed controller from those of all other turntables.
Based on Brinkmann’s third-generation RöNt power supply technology, Apollo’s bespoke supply employs the proprietary BZ 34 “Tube Rectifier Simulator” developed for RoNt. Semiconductors replace the RoNt’s tubes and the Apollo units also have a higher output current, enabling two motors to optimally driven. A fully discrete, mechanically and electrically separated power source with a dedicated transformer supplies the bearing heater and platter light.
Apollo’s Industrial Design, authored by Gryphon’s Soren Slebo, combines visual beauty with ideal rigidity and resonance control. Exploiting the strengths of constrained layer damping, Apollo’s chassis is based on a laminated “sandwich” construction of anodized aluminum, Kerrock, and “Smart Stack,” a damping compound patented by Denmark’s MENETA Group. Apollo’s considerable mass rests upon 4 solid, adjustable spikes. The motors are entirely decoupled from the structure, each mounted on its own, optimized subchassis.
Remarkable on its own, each part of the Apollo system—from turntable to tonearm to cartridge—has been purpose-engineered to perform perfectly with all others. The ability to control all variables during the design phase, combined with brilliant designers and matchless manufacturing capabilities, has yielded an analog playback system unprecedented in High End Audio history. It is not hyperbole to state that, with Apollo, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its state-of-the-art parts.
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