- Hello and welcome to Ask the Expert. My name is Christopher and I'm your host. With me today, I have Danny from our R&D department. Danny, can you talk a little bit about what you do at Dynaudio? - Yes, hello, I'm Danny and I work as a driver development engineer at Dynaudio. So it's basically everything is related to drivers. I've been with Dynaudio for two and a half years, so, been involved in the LYD project, the Contour project, and now their Confidence project. - So you've done a little bit of everything? - Yeah, I've been involved in every home and pro project in Dynaudio recent years. - That's pretty cool. - Yeah, yes. - And thank you for taking time out of your only day at High-End to come and speak with me. And I think that we should just jump straight into some of the questions that we got regarding drive units. - That's fine. - And first one is from Brent Wilson, and Brent, he wants to know what kind of improvement you can see in our drive units as they move up in range. - There's different aspects you can look into in the different categories, but one thing is that you have normally have more development time for more high-end versions where we wanna do everything new and improve of the finest details. And then there's also material cost, right, and assembly cost so, as far as... - So there's like a lot of different factors that you can play around with that. And, I think, some of the stuff that I know about is, you know, those far out magnets you can play around with, those neodymium magnets, and is it like when you move up in range we will always use the neodymium magnet, or? - Not necessarily, but it has some nice features. The magnetic strength of neodynium is way higher than ferrite, so you can do some stuff that's nearly impossible in ferrite. - Okay. - It will be very big. - And of course size does matter right, you don't want a loud speaker that's this big. - Maybe, maybe you don't want that. But yeah, I have seen some, yeah. (laughing) - Yeah, you see a lot of stuff at High End, there's no doubt about that. So, there are there any other factors that are especially interesting to talk about when you move up in range? Is it the materials? Is it... I know we use MSP all the way through. - Yeah, that's always used, so it's not like we have different grades of MSP. - No. - We have a very good basic level and then it can be in different shapes, different thicknesses around the, in the different ranges but yeah. - So it's, there's some magnets, what about voice coil, is there anything that... - They can ask for, like for example on the Confidence series we are using glass fiber in different configurations, depending what we need. For example, like three layers in the woofers of the Confidence 60. - Is that something new for Dynaudio, or? - Yeah, the number of layers and the way that we do it is different to what we've done before. - What about the material? Glass fiber... - Glass fiber has been used in. Also the Contour series, and also for some of the new products. - So, the next question, Danny, is from Howie Xerxes. And Howie is actually someone that we in the Social Media team know pretty well, because we have a long dialogue with him. He's very fond of our Special Forty loudspeakers. And, so Howie's question is about the hybrid magnet that you find in the Special Forty's woofer and his question is, can we expect to see that in, for instance, a Focus XD type of speaker? - Of course, I can't comment on future products but... If we should talk a little bit about the hybrid magnet system in Special Forty which is actually, in the Special Forty, it is an evolvement of the, or what can you say, evolution of the old Confidence woofers. - Okay. - So, it was also a hybrid magnet system with a neodymium inside a cup, and then an XL ferrite magnet, as we call it. - Pretty, but what is this special thing about them? Because I remember hearing something about it being one of the better drive units that we've... - Yeah. - In that size class that we've developed. - We actually took the Confidence C1 driver and looked at where could we improve the performance and then we looked to the magnet system, voice coil, spider, and all the parts where we could do improvements... So that's basically where the Special Forty woofer ended up being so. - Is there any, like, specific areas that you can talk about, where you did some changes? Some upgrades? - We did optimizations, on the magnet system, on all the, all parameters, so I don't know if I should talk into all the details about the... - A little detail is okay. - A little detail is okay. So, like technical terms, BL symmetry, and yeah. - A lot of different stuff, I guess, yeah. - And the field distribution in magnet gap, and stuff like that, we worked on. And simulations and then prototyping and stuff. - You also talked about the voice coil and the spider, right? - Yeah. So we also did improvements with that, as well. - So when you have a project like taking a already very good woofer, as you found in the C1, and you have to improve on that, how long does that take? I guess, it's something that you just wake up one day, and have an idea? - We had very different ideas to where we could go, and where we wanted to try and we tried different directions and made a lot of simulations and we figured out which way... - You wanted to take it. - We wanted to take it. So, that, I don't know, the whole process was, maybe from the start to the beginning, a year or something like that. - A year? - Yeah. - And, I guess that, in a process like this, with the facilities that we have, there's a lot of simulations, there's a lot of, okay, let's get this into Jupiter, to our measuring facility, and try and figure out how does it actually perform. - Yeah. - And listening afterwards. - Yeah, also that, so. (Danny laughs) There's a lot of different aspects to this from there. - It's in the Special Forty right now and, as you said, we can't really comment on where a woofer like this could end up. We like to keep stuff like that close to the chest, right? So, I think that we should move on to, to another question, which is about surrounds. And that's from Matthew. And what Matthew is asking is, what kind of surround shapes that we like to use or have tested. Can you talk a little bit about that? - Yeah, in Dynaudio, we have been using a lot of different shapes, so it could be like a circular, or it could be a elliptical surround or the newer, what we call horizon surround on the Confidence. So, it really comes down to what you want the driver to do, in terms of, excursion, frequency response, and how interaction between the surround and the cone gallantry, and all the parameters. So, you have to take into consideration what do you want from the driver, and also decide what surround you want to use. - So it's about looking at this driver has to perform at a certain level, under a certain set of circumstances, then figuring out. - What does, what do we need to do to the design to make it do that? So, that's again, simulations, and yeah. - A trip to Jupiter. - Also that. - You're talking about the new horizon shape that we are using. Can you talk a little bit about what's special with that one? - Yeah, we have made a surround that's like, that blends into the baffle. - Okay. - So, together with the... What is the name of that? I guess it's just, we call it, covering? - Yeah, yeah. - So, yeah, the surround is made specifically for this new mid-range, so we work on, again, all the parameters that we wanted for this mid-range. So, we took what we knew from our old mid-ranges, for example, from Contour, and then again we wanted to improve on every part so that the surround was one of the parts. - And what kind of, you told me about it blending into the covering, into the baffle. What kind of advantages does that offer? - One thing is, what the tweeter sees, obstructions, so to say, so a sudden change in geometry will make reflections or deflections of the sound. So, this way the tweeter will have a nice view a flat view from there. Also, we wanted to work on the, so called, first resonant mode of the surrounds. So we wanted to suppress this as much as possible. So we worked on the geometry to help us achieve that. - One of the things that I start thinking about is that I've seen the surround and it has some sharp edges. What does that do for the excursion of the cone? - We have worked on the geometry to allow the excursion that we need in the application. - Yeah, because it's a mid-range, so... - It's a mid-range so it doesn't need it to be able to move to plus minus 20 millimeters. Because mid-range is, maybe moving, depending on the level, and how it's immigrated, in a much lower range. - And, is it, so that was the Horizon mid-range unit, right, where we had this very special surround. Is there any of the newer projects that we've done where we have an equally special shape? - I think this is the most not circularish surround we have made. But, we have, again as I said, different shapes. For example, elliptical in the Contour range. - And, as you said earlier, it really depends on the application right? - Yeah it does. - I wanna continue talking a little bit about the materials that we use. We've covered, you know we've talked about MSP, that we've used that throughout all of our drive units, right? We've talked about the voice coils, and we've talked about magnets. But I actually wanna, I wanna go a little bit back to talking about the kind of material that we use for voice coils because that's something that Matthew also asked about. You mentioned that we use, was it three different types? - Of? - Of material for voice coils. - For voice coil formers? - Yes. - Or voice coil wire? - Both. - We're using two different kinds of materials for the voice coil wire. So it is aluminum or copper is the two main. - I think that where, where the train stops for me is that I'm maybe not entirely sure what the difference between the wire and the former is. - Okay, voice coil basically consists of two or three parts. That's how we always see it. You have the voice coil former, which is where you attach your cone and the spider and also the voice coil wire is attached to the voice coil former. So the former could be made of glass fiber, as we talked about earlier, or titanium, or aluminum, or Kapton, so yeah. There's all sorts of different types. - All weird stuff. - Then for wire material, normally we use aluminum, or copper. Mostly aluminum. - So different materials, and again, it's for the application that you are using right? - Yeah, depends on what we're... - And so, just again to, so I start to understand the difference between a wire and a former, the wire that goes around the former, then? And the former's purpose, is that just to keep things in place? - Yeah, it holds the wire where it needs to be. And it also is a neat way to attach the other parts. (both laughing) So to say. So, yeah. - Cool! And, is the thing, I hear a lot that one of the things that we emphasize a lot is testing different materials, constantly trying out new stuff. And I guess we do the same with this? - Yeah. Also that. As I said, we ended up with three layers of glass fiber in the Confidence 60 woofer, so that's why testing different material like titanium, aluminum, glass fibers, thicknesses of glass fibers, types of glass fiber. You can go totally crazy in all the materials, if you want. So it's also narrowing down. - Do you go totally crazy then? - Yeah, I mean, sometimes. We have to at some point narrow it down to. - Someone comes and says "Okay, playtime is, playtime's over." - Yeah. - Cool. - Danny, I think that we managed to talk about all the questions that we have for today. - That's good. - So, I think I'm gonna say thank you for joining us, and let you go and experience High-End a little bit more. - Thank you. - There's a lot to watch here. And, I think that, if you are in Munich, if you are close to the High-End show, you should come and have a listen to the new Confidence. We're previewing it here. Danny made most of the units that you can find in it. So come, give it a listen, and see you later.