We want to do a new speaker It is very important that you do it in cross functional teams: Meaning that you have all the various functions in one team. You don’t have a design department, acoustic department that sits in their own room doing their own thing. Though you bring together all the people. That will be the founding fathers of the speaker. And then they work together. They understand the need for design, They understand the need for acoustics but every design choice, industrial design choice, is founded in an acoustic need. At Dynaudio sound is king. We set the ultimate goal for sound quality and then design the cabinet to match it. The new driver required a much stronger cabinet built and design. So for the first time ever, we designed a speaker with soft edges. It is a design which is… Firstly, shaped to get the sound as good as possible and Malte brought in some really nice details, for example the front baffle in aluminium is perfect because the drivers are screwed into a firm alu-plate which does not vibrate and bended cabinets are actually more stronger than the normal square or rectangular cabinets because the side panels move less. So you could explain this like if you have a panel which is like straight, it could move in this direction and with the energy that the loud speaker produces within the cabinet There is a huge pressure and can make move the panel. When you bend it, it moves much less. I like to compare it to the egg. Take a raw egg - So uncooked egg... and put it in your hand and press firmly with all your fingers around the egg and make a high pressure. You wont be able to break it because the shape of the edge is the most perfect shape to keep something very strong. So we take the same shape of the egg and put it on the speaker and we got a much stronger cabinet. Beside the fact that the side walls are bended They are not parallel so we avoid standing waves which is a problem when you have very rectangular cabinets. So we need less damping material which gives a more vivid sound. And damping means it doesn’t only damp the standing wave but also sucks energy from the driver. Also the cabinets have been braced. That means pieces of wood which make it even more stronger… One of the main things on the existing Contour is the simple and honest construction. We have simple materials we have like three different materials in the construction and that was one of the main parts we wanted to transform to the new design. It was very apparent that some of the qualities of the latest Contour was built on that design with a metal plate. We decided to go with the aluminium-stat because we could get the rounded edges instead. Which is something we really wanted in terms of getting rid of the diffractions around the tweeter So to get the rounded shape, we had to change materials with aluminium. But when you change to aluminium you have to go with a larger thickness that is why we have a very thick aluminium front on the speaker. The design feature I am most proud of is the combination of the aluminium baffle with the wooden cabinet. These are two really big features in the old existing Contour but also in the new Contour.