Natural Selection…

The iconic Jordan 50mm module.

The EJ Jordan Greenwich is a smallish box, 420mm high, 250mm wide and 210mm deep. Construction is as ‘British-traditional’ as the proportions, with a thin-wall, front reflex loaded cabinet built from heavily damped 9mm birch-ply, sporting a pair of identical, vertically disposed Eikona drivers. The true purist will reach for the Marlow, a genuine one-driver/zero-crossover design, but irrespective of quality, you can only get so much quantity out of a single 92mm cone in an eight-litre box. The Greenwich doubles up on the drivers, doubles the volume, beefs up the bandwidth and adds 3dB to the sensitivity. The end result is a still compact cabinet that offers 86dB efficiency and a useable bandwidth from 44Hz to 18kHz ±3dB. Impedance is a nominal 16Ω, with a 12Ω minimum, making it notably amp (and tube) friendly, helping compensate for the low sensitivity. As easing the amplifier’s task is the other half of the crossover-less equation, this constitutes an advantageous doubling down. The Greenwich is not entirely filter-less, as the lower driver uses inline capacitance to roll off its upper frequencies in order to aid overall balance and avoid treble cancellation, but in terms of balancing bandwidth and cabinet dimensions, it’s pretty much as close as you are going to get.

Before I hear screams of outrage from all those affronted by the notion of 44Hz constituting ‘useable’ bass extension, let me just point out the number of people who promote the ludicrous notion of the LS3/5a as a hi-fi (even a high-end) speaker – a product that was designed as a speech monitor for outside broadcast vans, which helps explain its -3dB point at 70Hz! Back in the real world, I always look for at least 50Hz from a speaker, in order to achieve a reasonable sense of the performance and recording. 44Hz betters that comfortably, so the Greenwich gets a pass, at least on paper. How that works out in practice, on the end of a system, time will tell, but the presence of the Greenwich is no accident and its implications reach far beyond a pair of small cabinets, a quartet of even smaller drivers and a single review. Hence this precursor. Let the fun begin…