John Darko
Dynaudio will be showing off four new products next week at Munich High-End.
First out of the gate is a new member of the Heritage Series that effectively turns the Heritage Special standmount loudspeaker into a floorstander. The new Contour Legacy is a 2.5-way design featuring a 2.8cm Esotar soft-dome tweeter, an 18cm mid/bass driver and an 18cm bass driver, all crossed over with ‘premium components’. The finish is a real-wood veneer American Walnut and the production run will be limited to 1000 pairs worldwide. Hello, FOMO!
Next is an active take on the Confidence 20 standmount loudspeaker where the Pascal amplifiers – one per driver – reside inside the stand. The Confidence 20A then offers XLR inputs to any analogue source with a volume control. Taking cues from Dynaudio’s pro line-up, room boundary compensation, input sensitivity and tonal balance settings are powered by DSP and the internal sample-rate conversion is also bypassable, which suggests that the Confidence 20A will also talk to digital sources – but that remains TBC.
Remember the Contour 20? The Contour 20i is returning in a mirror-like high gloss black finish with a black anodised front baffle to be called the Black Edition. The change-up isn’t only cosmetic: the tweeter has been upgraded from the Esotar 2i to the Esotar 3, the mid/bass driver’s motor and spider improved and the crossover “given a full makeover”.
Lastly, a new standmount speaker called The Bookshelf, “a joint project between Dynaudio, Keiji Ashizawa Design of Tokyo and Karimoku of Japan.”
This new model also features an Esotar 3 tweeter and borrows its mid/bass driver from the Confidence 20. The crossover is described as “traditionally simple” so it’s probably a first order-type that many Dynaudio speakers are known for.
However, the star of this show is the cabinet about which Dynaudio says: “…is made from Japanese oak that’s been sourced sustainably from the beautiful Hokkaido prefecture in the north of the country. The wood is dried and prepared for between three and six months at Karimoku’s facility near Nagoya, before being carefully cut, constructed and finished at the company’s factory in Gifu.”
The Bookshelf won’t be a limited edition but production numbers are projected to be ‘low’.
What’s missing from this strip tease of an announcement is pricing. Dynaudio is set to release that information from the MOC show floor next Thursday.
From the press release: “All four new products on display at the High-End show are preview models that will be launched for sale later in 2024, and might not be exactly the same in spec as you’ll see at the show. There will be information on prices in Munich.”
But why?
It could be that these new products aren’t yet finished but if pricing will be announced next week, why not announce pricing now so that press members (and Joe Public) can determine if a product suits their audience (or budget) and can design their show walkabout accordingly?
We might want to learn more about The Bookshelf at €10K but perhaps not at €50K. A product’s price is a powerful filter and writing from the sharper end of today’s pencil, pre-show announcements allow us to move past the ‘what’ and the ‘how much’ to focus on the ‘why’ and the ‘how’. In other words, they allow us to go deeper on a product once we’re in Bavaria to generate greater differences between the show reports written (or recorded) by those who still see value in doing so.
Side note: having made a pair of run-and-gun videos about this topic for Patreon yesterday, some of my Patrons responding in the comments section told me they want to see show reports that talk about emerging trends and themes; and that they care less for the homogeny of press release processing and photo dumps.
As I wrote to WiiM via email last week, “This information is useful but without pricing, it’s also incomplete. It’s half a story. And if I am walking the show floor during the day and dining with friends whom I only get to see once a year in the evening, I cannot write about your new product if you don’t announce pricing until after the show has started. It’s why I (and many of my colleagues) now only cover products announced before the show because, as solo operators, we’re back on the review treadmill as soon as we get back home. I would ask you to consider who is being served by waiting until the show itself to pull back the covers on a new product and its pricing. I would love to see you pre-announce all the juicy details beforehand and without a first-day embargo.”
To that end, I applaud manufacturers like Dynaudio for announcing new products before Munich High-End kicks off but it remains baffling as to why the Danes would artificially withhold pricing information.
Further information: Dynaudio
