John
A new loudspeaker from Dynaudio is upon us. One that aims to marry old school looks with modern tech. Let’s strip away the story-telling to take a closer look because what we have here is a two-way design that looks like a 70s throwback but internalises an abundance of the Danish company’s 2020 tech.
The incoming Heritage Special is an 11kg high-end standmount whose cabinet, according to Dynaudio, takes three full days to make: a 19mm MDF structure wears a bitumen lining on the inside and eye-matched American Walnut veneer on the outside, the latter reportedly lacquered and polished three times. The cabinet’s internal damping material is polyester…but from Sweden.
As is usual practice for Dynaudio, the Heritage Special’s drivers are all designed and made in-house. The tweeter – a soft-dome 28mm Esotar 3 – has trickled-down from the more costly Confidence series to feature a “powerful neodymium magnet, larger rear chamber and resonance-defeating Hexis inner dome”.
For the new model’s 18cm mid/bass driver, Dynaudio has reached even higher — to the Evidence Platinum series to produce the catchily-named ’18W75XL Heritage Special MSP’, here modernised with 1) an improved voice coil, 2) a hybrid magnet system with neodymium and ferrite magnets and 3) a Nomex spider borrowed from the Confidence and Contour i.
But wait? Did you see that crossover (at the very bottom of the cabinet)? Like the Special Forty, it’s a first-order implementation. From Wikipedia: “First-order filters are considered by many audiophiles to be ideal for crossovers. This is because this filter type is ‘transient perfect’, meaning it passes both amplitude and phase unchanged across the range of interest.”
Unlike the Special Forty, the Heritage Special’s crossover is a big ‘un, positively bursting with Mundorf components. According to Dynaudio, the board also carries “a local impedance-correction … for each individual tweeter and woofer, as well as time-alignment technology, to make for a silky-smooth transition between drivers.”
Rounding out the Danish company’s attention to modern-day details on its retro-styled loudspeaker are WBT binding posts that pass the audio signal to the crossover and beyond over Van Den Hul wiring. Nominal impedance sits at 4 Ohms.
Don’t dawdle on these though. The Heritage Special is available now with its production limited to 2500 individually-numbered pairs. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Pricing says hello at €6000/pair.
Further information: Dynaudio
