Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

Ah, Denmark. Land of the Vikings and blue-eyed, blond-haired folk with faces sculpted just so. I loved my week there as a Stereophile correspondent and member of a scraggly scrum of audio journalists whisked to DALI headquarters on a promotional junket.

Aside from its universal attractiveness, what struck me during my stay in the southernmost and smallest of the Scandinavian countries was how by North American standards the more densely populated cities I visited, Copenhagen and Aarhus, seemed orderly and clean. Cars, pedestrians, and cyclists kept tightly to their lanes. I saw no cigarette butts on the sidewalk and only sparse pockets of graffiti. There seemed to be a natural, sequential flow to everything—an evenness and balance that was close to idyllic.

Outside its bigger cities, Denmark looks pastoral, with long stretches of grassy fields sporadically interrupted by broad bodies of water, and bucolic towns that seem to have sprouted in the middle of nowhere. It's in these towns that a lot of Danish hi-fi is made: DALI in Nørager (population 1143); Dynaudio in Skanderborg (population 20,000). Skanderborg contains evidence of human settlements belonging to the earliest Nordic Stone Age, starting some 100,000 years ago.

Dynaudio doesn't go back quite that far; the company was founded in 1977. Shortly thereafter, the company began manufacturing the drivers used in its speakers; later, it sold its drivers as OEM parts to speaker manufacturers worldwide. That stopped in the early 2000s; then, in 2014, the company sold 83% of its shares to China-based GoerTek, an 80,000-employee electronics manufacturer that supplies parts to Samsung, Apple, and Sony, among other large companies. Dynaudio is GoerTek's first and only high-end audio company acquisition, which made me wonder what would prompt a massive, mainstream company such as GoerTek to get involved with a single Danish high-end speaker company.

Turns out, the GoerTek-Dynaudio relationship began a decade before the acquisition. As John Quick, Dynaudio's VP of North American sales and marketing, explained in an email, "Dynaudio opened a corporate office and a boutique Dynaudio store in China in the early 2000s, and by the mid-2000s already had contracts with two major carmakers to supply speakers for their cars. The owners of GoerTek are big fans and owners of Dynaudio's former flagship Evidence and Consequence ranges. The idea of owning a marquee Hi-Fi brand that also had a potential bigger-picture reach, through automotive and possibly lifestyle audio, made it a passion play that also had a good business case."

The Contour 30i
While Dynaudio's lower-cost products are, for competitive reasons, built in China, its higher-end wares, including the Contour 30i ($9500/pair), continue to be built in the company's land of origin. The "i" in the 30i stands for "improved," which means they're better than the company's original 30, which was launched in 2016. John Quick again: "The Contour 'i' model was released in 2020–2021. The primary improvements made were the addition of the Esotar2i tweeter's Hexis rear-wave resonance-damping dome, whose larger and damped rear chamber serves to give the tweeter more room to breathe and allows the diffused rear-wave energy to be absorbed. It also uses a more powerful neodymium magnet, to increase sensitivity to better reproduce the slightest details, a stronger and more compact magnet system on all drivers, and a corresponding retuning of the crossovers, internal wiring, and cabinets." The Hexis dome was trickled down from the flagship Confidence range; it is also used in the Core series of professional monitors.

The Contour 30i uses two identical, 7.1" drivers for its midrange and bass. The cones are made with the company's proprietary Magnesium Silicate Polymer (MSP) material, whose formulation hasn't changed since 1977. Why? Because it has, Quick said, an "ideal balance between weight, rigidity, and self-damping properties." He added, "Because Dynaudio builds its own drivers, the company has complete control over the profile and thickness of each diaphragm, so each is customized for its specific application." The driver's spider is—it sounds paradoxical but I'm sure it's true—"asymmetric ... for increased system symmetry." It's made of aramid fibers—so it's similar to Kevlar—"for improved acoustic response." The voice coils in the 30i's drivers use aluminum instead of copper. "Aluminum voice coils have 70% of the conductivity of copper," said John. "But only a third of its weight. There is some sacrifice in sensitivity, but the lowered weight, combined with aluminum's ability to not retain heat, improves power handling and reliability."

While Dynaudio relies on measurements, it concedes that they can only get you so far. Dynaudio engineers experimented with smaller voice coils on the Contour 30i, which measured better. But, to quote the company's website, "Our ears said otherwise, so we went big."

The new model's crossover also got the "i" treatment. It has been simplified, stripped of its earlier impedance-correction circuitry. "That's all now done in the driver itself, simply down to the physical properties of the materials we use. Fewer components, cleaner signal path, better performance," Dynaudio says.

The Contour 30i is a 2.5-way design with a rated sensitivity of 87dB/2.83V/m. The .5 refers to the addition of a dedicated bass driver that "piggybacks" on what is otherwise a two-way design. In an email, Product Training Manager Otto Jorgensen called the 2.5 method a "best of both worlds. At low frequencies, the output from the system is omnidirectional, which means that some of the driver's output at lower frequencies is 'lost' compared to the higher frequency output, which is directed forward. In a 2-way speaker, the output must be lowered at the higher frequencies to compensate for this. In a 2.5-way speaker, the 'missing' low frequencies are filled in by the additional woofer, negating the need to pad down the higher frequencies. Another way to say it: It's a method of baffle-step compensation.

"The benefit to this approach," he continued, "is higher sensitivity, output, and power handling at a cost that is lower than a 3-way design." The Contour 30i has two rear ports; the original 30 only had one.

My pair arrived in the lustrously stratified Nordic Silver finish. Compared to where my Focal Aria K2 936s stood, the Contours, which are slimmer and about the same height as the Focals, each ended up about a foot closer to the center—so, 2' closer together and farther away from any walls. Like my Focals, the Contours were aimed almost directly at me, angled just slightly out so that I could just see the inside of each cabinet. This setup produced a vast, spatially well-delineated soundstage with taut, well-defined bass that, according to the Bass Decade track on Stereophile's Test CD 2 (CD, STPH 004-2, no longer available), extended solidly and uniformly down to 63Hz, with diminishing bass energy starting at 50Hz, still audible at 25Hz.

Listening
Have you ever heard of the five-second audio high? It's a real thing, with effects similar to when a drug takes hold. The rush. It's what happens when you install a new component in your system and the first five seconds of hearing it play sound so promising it triggers a consciousness liftoff—a hope-fueled high—derived from a heady mix of surpassed expectations and fear that your expectations won't be fulfilled.

I've written about the habituation process—the period it takes for us to get used to the sound of a component or system we're unfamiliar with but end up liking. It usually unfolds over time, with pivotal moments along the way when we're not sure anymore what it was in the sound we weren't sure about.

With the 30i, the biggest shift in my habituation process came in the first minute of listening to it—30 seconds for my mind to adjust to my sense that there was less bass energy than my Focal Aria K2 936s produce; the next 30 to wrap my mind around the surfeit of new musical information I was now privy to.

Case in point: The looping bass notes and thrusted drumbeat that launch "Chubb Sub," the first track on Medeski Martin and Wood's compilation album Last Chance to Dance Trance (perhaps), Best Of (1991-1996) (CD, Gramavision 79520), sounded both less voluminous but more dynamically spry and articulate than through my Focals.

My five-second high took off when what I was expecting to hear—John Medeski's smallish-sounding keyboard joining the fray, wedged between Chris Wood's bass and Billy Martin's drums—was now a stenciled, scenic view into his playing, with both hands now operating separately whereas before they seemed superimposed. Which is to say that despite the fact that these speakers were closer together than my Focals, the soundstage was more spacious, almost Hoberman spherelike, with more depth and air between instruments.

The third cut on this album, "Last Chance to Dance Trance (Perhaps)," was a masterclass in transparency and tone. What I'd always assumed were percussive beads being shaken at the beginning of the track turned out to be percussive shells; with the Contours I could clearly hear the shape and consistency of the objects creating the sound: hollow, thin, organic, capsule-like frames rubbing together. Another example of the same phenomenon (with a different material) was when Martin's stick shattered the loosely tightened skin on his snare drum; a third was Wood's fleshy finger flicks off the strings of his upright bass. Again I heard air—ejected from instruments, hanging between notes where previously there was nothing.

The electric bass riff that opens the album's final track, "Night Marchers," a live cut, produces a careening, deep-buzzing string effect that, through my Focals, directed the bass toward me in an eruption of horizontally displaced air; now that sound seemed to travel less horizontally and more vertically—and it more obviously originated in an instrument, like the waterspout from a fountain. It made the center half of my listening room glow in a cloud of dark tone, which brought the venue's walls and ceiling into view. When Martin's funky drumbeat came loping in, with Medeski's crunching keyboard chords in tow, it was easy to hear what each artist was doing and how he played off the others. The music made more musical sense. And it just went on.