Telegrapher Gorilla

Telegrapher may be a young company, but their flagship three‑way monitors are up there with the very best.

Telegrapher Loudspeakers are a three‑year‑old professional monitor manufacturer based in Istanbul, Turkey, and their first products comprise the Fox compact two‑way active monitor, the Elephant active subwoofer, and the Gorilla and Gorilla‑S: both three‑way, active midfield monitors. The subject of this review is the Gorilla, which features a single woofer compared to the two woofers of the Gorilla‑S.

Telegrapher have made a significant splash in the pro audio media and forums over the last six months or so, perhaps partly thanks to their bold enclosure colours and the large hemispherical decoupling feet they are sometimes photographed standing on. There is of course more to the Telegrapher Gorilla than striking colours and generous feet. I’ll start with a general description.

Going Ape

At 32 x 45 x 30 cm, the Gorilla sits in that slightly awkward size range where it’s perhaps slightly too big to fit comfortably in some studio locations, particularly because it’s primarily designed to be used in landscape orientation so is relatively wide. I found myself having to move things around to get the Gorillas on my monitor shelf, so should you find them intriguing by the end of this review, their size is something to bear in mind. As is their weight. A Gorilla is heavy (you don’t say!), weighing in at 21kg, and I found lifting them onto the aforementioned monitor shelf to be a somewhat risky challenge — especially considering their bar of soap corners (there’s nothing to grab hold of) and their decoupling feet.

The Gorilla’s weight results from the combination of a very thick‑walled and dense birch plywood enclosure, and heavily engineered drivers that incorporate generous magnets. The enclosure feels quite literally as if it’s carved from a solid block and I don’t think there’s much risk of the Gorilla suffering from enclosure panel resonance. Along with the weight, a further witness to the enclosure wall thickness is that its corners feature generous radii that soften the overall aesthetic and will undoubtedly help with the suppression of acoustic edge diffraction. And if that weren’t enough wall thickness indication, despite the external dimensions of the Gorilla multiplying up to a volume of 43 litres, the internal volume is only 14 litres.

Interestingly, Telegrapher’s CEO, Erce Kaslioglu, has a parallel career in a business that provides high‑end trims and finishes for specialist automotive companies (mataauto.com), and this shows in the very high‑quality finish of the Gorilla. Indeed, Telegrapher products are assembled at one of Mata Automotive’s facilities. The Gorilla is finished in a stylish, finely textured paint (as are its hugely impressive delivery packing cases), but I found the finish to mark relatively easily. The life of a review product is hard as it gets manhandled and moved from one location to the next, and the finish on the Gorilla began to show evidence of that. Of course this would likely not be an issue for a pair of monitors carefully installed and never again moved, but even so, I’d try to avoid putting a mug of coffee down on a Gorilla (pretty reasonable advice for life generally I’d argue). And if the textured paint is not to your liking, even in the ‘Jaipur Orange’ that many of the Telegrapher press photos have illustrated (I was mildly disappointed to find my review pair were grey), a wide range of colours and finishes is available from Telegrapher.

The Gorilla, in ‘Jaipur Orange’ finish and with decoupling feet attached.

Amped Up

Around the back is a heatsink and connection panel that’s home to a mains connector and power switch, a balanced analogue XLR input and an unbalanced RCA phono input. There’s also a couple of push buttons to select between the inputs and enable/disable auto‑standby. Telegrapher say their monitor philosophy is very much ‘plug and play’, so the lack of any extensive configuration facilities is part of the proposition. They believe that if the fundamental electro‑acoustics are right, there should be no need for complex setup and room optimisation procedures. This philosophy also ties in with their Amphion‑like reluctance to embrace DSP: everything is analogue within the Gorilla and Telegrapher promote the fully analogue nature of their monitors as a positive benefit. While DSP is not fundamentally a bad thing, they argue, if the analogue electro‑acoustics are on point there ought to be no need for the complexity of DSP and its inherent potential to introduce performance issues.

Behind the Gorilla heatsink and connection panel are electronic modules that handle crossover and amplification. The active crossover is an in‑house design, whereas the amplification comprises Class‑D modules from Dutch specialists Hypex. The crossover frequencies are at 280Hz and 1.8kHz and the amplification is rated at 500 Watts each for the bass and midrange drivers, and 100 Watts for the tweeter. The difference in power ratings between the tweeter and the other drivers simply reflects that tweeters tend to be inherently much more sensitive than bass/midrange drivers so require less power to reach the same volume level.

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