The fully and beautifully veneered front baffle suggests that the manufacturer expects the Greenwich to be used without the grilles in place, a view supported by the eclectic and distinctly specialist nature of the beast. On that baffle you’ll find a pair of identical 93mm Jordan Eikona drivers, reflex loaded by twin, forward firing, small bore ports. That’s right – no hidden tweeter or dual-concentric drivers here. What you see is what you get: a pair of small aluminium alloy cones doing the whole job. Of course, these are no ordinary cones, with both design and materials refined over decades of continuous development. But, both the size of the ports and the diameter of the drivers suggest you’ll be looking at limited bandwidth here – although ultimately, that too might surprise you. Despite the use of ‘full-range’ drivers and a modest cabinet volume, the Greenwich makes a far more serious stab at the musically convincing miniature category than a number of other designs that get more ink and far more attention.
The traditional appearance is more than skin deep. The Greenwich cabinet uses the classic thin-wall with damping pads, birch-ply design pioneered by the BBC. The 9mm enclosure walls have a positive affect on the internal volume, which measures 16 Litres (or three times the enclosed volume of an LS 3/5a – a point of comparison I’ll be returning to more than once) and helps justify the claimed sensitivity and bandwidth of 86dB and 44Hz to 18kHz. But what really sets the Greenwich apart is the absence of a conventional crossover. The twin drivers are connected in series, resulting in an amp friendly 16Ω load (12Ω minimum). A modicum of capacitive filtering, using carefully selected components, combined with the inherent electrical inductance of the second driver act to roll off the upper frequencies of the lower driver, thus preventing overlapping output and interference through the upper midrange and treble. That aside, the output of your amplifier will be connected directly to the drivers’ voice coils, maximising control, rise time, signal tracking and dynamic response. Combine that with the relatively generous, ported internal volume and it’s not hard to understand the design’s transparent, easy breathing musical presentation – a world away from the extruded, constipated dynamic tracking of so many small speakers.
Now let’s compare those figures to that Doyenne of miniature speakers, the LS 3/5a. The venerable BBC speech monitor (yes, that’s right, it was never intended to reproduce music, just announcements within the confines of an outside broadcast trailer) possesses cripplingly low 82.5dB sensitivity, an 8Ω impedance with a 4.3Ω minimum (although that varies depending on the age and model) and a -6dB point at around 70Hz! You can boost the bass by pushing the speaker back against the wall, but when it comes to mini-monitors, unless they’ve been specifically designed with that in mind, that amounts to throwing out the baby with the bath water. Even those speakers (like the Linn Kann) that are intended for near-wall placement sacrifice any sense of stage depth or acoustic space as a result. All of which is a world away from the expansive soundstage and musical immediacy you get from the Greenwich. But let’s start at the beginning…
Set up and system matching…
Setting up the Greenwich, like most small speakers, is an easy task – at least physically. The five post open frame stands need to be assembled and the speakers sat on top, spaced by slightly tacky rubber blocks. So far so good. The challenges start with the terminals. These sound superb, especially if you use 4mm banana plugs. Being copper, the soft nature of the material dictates course threads and large diameter posts – so large that all but the biggest spades are going to struggle to reach either side of them. If your cables use spades, you need to check that they’ll fit: the jaws need to be at least 12mm width. Best option – stick with bananas. In part, the design limitation is deliberate. Where it is easy to find banana plugs based on copper metalwork, the vast majority of speaker spades are based on brass, which doesn’t sound great. Rather than using spades, the intention is that you use bare (preferably copper) wire and clamp it hard, creating a cold weld. I didn’t actually try this, having copper terminated cables on hand, but I can certainly see the logic…
