Just over a year ago we featured Karl in our blog, describing the search which led him to buying a pair of Greenwich loudspeakers. Karl has now added a REL Classic subwoofer to his system. This is often a tricky process but he persisted to get everything just right and is thoroughly delighted with the results:
I currently have a REL Classic 98 sub on home demo. It’s taken a little while to get it properly set-up and dialed-in, but as you suspected might be the case, it really seems to work rather well with the Greenwich. Most importantly, the Greenwich still sound like themselves, which was always one of the prerequisites of trying a sub.
Initially, the sub seemed to impact on the Greenwich by making the mid and treble sound less smooth and almost unlistenable at high volumes, but then I remembered the phase switch on the REL (!!) and thankfully, the Greenwich’s smooth upper frequencies returned, such that they really do sound all but identical when playing the same track with the sub switched on and off.
I have the sub crossover set at 75Hz. I appreciate what you said about this potentially interfering with (or taking over) the Greenwich’s own lower frequencies, but this does seem to be the preferred setting to my ears. When compared to the sound with the crossover frequency set lower, there was definitely a little bit of stridency creeping in to the mid/treble with the volume turned-up, presumably due to upsetting the balance a phase issue or perhaps some other psychoacoustic artefact, but with the crossover set a bit higher, the Greenwich sound as smooth as ever. The new position of the sub (just behind and to the left of the left-hand speaker) also seems to impact the Greenwich less than when the sub was sat in-between the speakers. Again, all this is going to be room dependant.
But with things integrated well, it really does feel like the sub is getting even more out of the Greenwich, which is quite hard to believe given how fabulous they already were. I’m now starting to understand the idea of the sense of ‘space’ that a well-integrated sub can bring. There is no doubt that the soundstage has opened up, but thankfully this doesn’t seem to be at the expense of imaging. The surprising thing though is that it feels like even more detail is being dug out and the dynamics have been pushed up a tiny notch.
It has taken some fettling to get to this point, but it now feels like the addition of a sub is revealing the full true potential of the Greenwich. They really do sound quite remarkable.
To help illustrate, for the past few years I have attended the annual Audio Show Deluxe at Whittlebury Park. If you’re not familiar with it, the aim of this show is to allow manufacturers and retailers to show off the very best that the world of audio has to offer and has included more than one system over the past couple of years worth in excess of £1 million. Hotel room restrictions aside, over the years, I can think of only one (maybe 2) systems that I would take over what I currently have in my living room now!
For further details of the REL subwoofer, click here. And you can read more about the Greenwich on our website here.