The cabinets, possibly the most interesting part, are handmade from 22mm thick solid ash although other hardwoods are available all timber is local and sustainably sourced. 99.9% purity copper wire with polyethylene sleeving is used to make point-to-point connections in the crossovers which use Sonicaps, Miflex copper capacitors and Erse air core inductors. In the X1, a pair of highly-respected drive units are combined: the 25mm (1-inch) fabric-dome tweeter with neodymium magnet, and a 165mm (6.5-inch) high excursion, coated-paper cone in a rubber surround, are both from the Peerless catalogue. That’s been resolved by building a small kiln to reduce the moisture content, the timber used is either air-dried or kiln-dried already and usually has a moisture content of 12-15% this is then reduced to around 6-8% before the inside of the cabinet is sealed to prevent moisture absorption through the port.
Using home-grown timber also brought some unique problems, the first being movement. This affects the sale price but Coppice have made the conscious decision not to scrimp on material costs at the expense of sound quality. Those bespoke cabinets are expensive to produce, with a pair of X1 cabinets taking two-days to build. The result has made the most of Ryan’s music production skills and the pair’s joinery business to set the level for sound quality. So, it was not until we got to the current version of the X1, that he was happy with the sound so ultimately we ended up with a speaker that we are both very pleased with and are happy to let people hear.” “However, once we started, it became very apparent that Ryan has very good ears and, as a producer, could hear issues with the first designs that I did not notice”, adds Mal. “With regard to how they sound, we initially wanted something that just sounded ‘good’”, I’m assured. A loudspeaker is a prominent item which takes pride of place in any audiophile’s listening room and, given a choice, they probably wouldn’t have MDF furniture! By using real woods, we can offer something different which is a much higher quality than veneered fibreboard. All cabinets ‘colour’ the sound to some degree and, although MDF has many advantages, it does have its own distinct sound. “We quickly learned that there’s a reason why most speakers are made with MDF as we spent year two working with a designer, and experimenting with different woods and damping, until we were satisfied that we had overcome the many issues. Using nature’s bounty wasn’t as easy as first appeared though. All along though, we knew that we wanted to use solid wood: as joiners, our skills lie with working with real wood and using MDF with our bespoke stands would have been a crime!”
#Coppice designs drivers#
“So, for the first year, we researched various drivers and honed some designs using the standard MDF for the prototypes. “I have had some experience in building speakers in the past” Mal tells me. That’s how the name Coppice Audio originated, and the speakers came about when the duo realised that they would need their own model to fit the stands. The pair therefore decided to ‘grow’ some speaker stands, based on a combination of the chair technique and traditional coppicing.
“We wanted to use this same technique to make our own product as we both enjoy music and my colleague, Ryan, is a keen music producer,” explains Mal. “Primarily, we wanted to utilise the three-acres of woodland that we have in Malvern and were inspired by an online video ‘Growing Furniture’ about a business that took a sapling, trained and grafted the branches together to form the shape of a chair from one piece of wood.
“We are both carpenters and joiners by trade”, I am told. Talking to Mal and Ryan, the guys behind Coppice, it becomes clear that, initially at least, they did not approach their loudspeaker design from a purely acoustic perspective. But the company’s roots (pun intended) have a rather interesting twist. What we have is solid timber, and home-grown in Malvern at that. So, none of your nasty laminated MDF here. The most striking thing about this little box is the carpentry, and that’s hardly surprising since its creators are from a woodworking background. Coppice Audio was officially launched at the UK Hi-Fi Show in Daventry last year where they showed pre-production samples of the floorstanding X2 and the two-way standmount X1 on test here. If a new product is exciting news for a reviewer then one from a brand-new company is even more so.
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