That day arrived with the AXjet Pros, a thoroughly modern, balanced horn design based around a single AER driver, with its compound cone so reminiscent of those earlier, Lowther designs. 40-years in the making, the AXjets underlined both the challenges of working with any single-driver design, let alone a horn, and the near impossibility of achieving full-range results without resorting to some kind of bass augmentation. In the case of the Pros, that augmentation comes in the shape of a separate, actively driven bass driver, incorporated in a tapped-horn topology. In fairness, ultra-purists can get the AX SuperJets, without the extra bass-unit, but once heard, the AXjet Pros are hard to give up for their cheaper, simpler brethren. Wherein lies the rub. The Pros are a great, but costly route to musical bliss, well-beyond the means of most musical mortals. If dispensing with the crossover is going to be any kind of generally viable option, it needs to be relevant at well below the €10K price point, an alternative to a speaker like the Living Voice R25, which already goes a long way to ameliorating the damage done by its crossover through carefully executed, conventional means. How much performance (and how much bandwidth) can such a speaker realistically deliver?
To investigate just that question, I borrowed a pair of EJ Jordan Greenwich loudspeakers, a compact, dual driver design sporting a pair of highly evolved full-range drivers, each based on a 92mm aluminium cone and a driver design that has its roots in the ‘60s. If anybody can lay claim to being the father of the crossover-less loudspeaker, then EJ ‘Ted’ Jordan has more right than most. An unfairly over-looked influence in loudspeaker design, he started his working life at the venerable UK manufacturer Goodmans, as early as 1952, where he was involved in the development of wide-range, electrostatic and metal coned drive units. In the ‘60s he helped establish Jordan-Watts, producing a widely used, nominally full-range 100mm driver module. In the ‘70s he set up on his own, creating what was arguably his most iconic design, the 50mm Jordan driver, an aluminium con designed to cover the frequency range from 150Hz upwards. Its distinctive appearance quickly became associated with speaker designs from Townshend, Electrofluidics, Credo and Sequerra. Alongside the 50mm module, he also offered 125 and 150mm aluminium coned bass drivers.
Further research into cone materials and driver behaviour convinced Jordan that the carefully selected alloys he was using still offered superior performance to emerging alternatives, although the Holy Grail of full-range performance remained elusive. By the turn of the ‘90s he was working on his last great project, the 92mm cone that would become the J91/JX92 Series and, finally, the 100mm Eikona driver used in the Greenwich (and its single-driver sibling, the Marlow). Ted Jordan died in 2016, but the company bearing his name continues to this day, a living testament to the lasting appeal of his design goals. If there’s a speaker that can unlock the magic of a crossover-less design and reveal its strengths while living with its weaknesses, all at something approaching an affordable price, there’s no better place to look than this.
