“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!” “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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