A lifelong dream
Gryphon Audio Designs is the brainchild of Flemming E. Rasmussen and the fulfilment of a lifelong dream to allow the purest essence of the live music experience to be recreated in the home environment.
Rasmussen holds a degree in painting and graphic arts from the Aarhus Art Academy, Denmark. During his studies, Rasmussen developed close relationships with the local music community and designed LP covers and concert posters for many leading local acts.
After graduation, he taught photography and painting for ten years before becoming chief designer of textiles and imprints for Scandinavia’s largest sportswear manufacturer, advancing to the position of president of the company’s printing plant before resigning to found 2R Marketing, which quickly became Denmark’s leading High End audio import company.
Gryphon Audio Designs was founded in 1985 as an offshoot of 2R Marketing, The first product, the now legendary Gryphon Head Amp, grew from a one-off spare time project developed only for the designers’ own home systems. At the 1986 Chicago Consumer Electronics Show, a respected Japanese distributor expressed interest in the product. Soon after, the Head Amp was voted “Best Buy” by the Japanese audio press. Although the Gryphon project was initially strictly a hobby, not an actively pursued commercial venture, demand generated by reviews and word-of-mouth acclaim led to the formal establishment of Gryphon Audio Designs as a separate corporate entity.
Following the immediate success of the Gryphon brand, all import business was phased out in 1993, so that Rasmussen could dedicate his efforts entirely to Gryphon.
Gryphon Audio Designs achieved immediate and on-going global acclaim for state of the art performance, intuitive ergonomics and the stunning beauty of the cost-no-object Gryphon preamplifiers and power amplifiers. Rasmussen’s background in fine arts and industrial design gives every Gryphon product a distinctive, luxuriant finish which arises organically out of the audio circuit design and the user interface for a truly unique integration of form and function.