DYNAUDIO Contour 20 Black Edition

Contour 20: the new black

Contour 20 Black Edition is a super-premium version of the award-winning Contour 20i.

Its tweeter has been upgraded from the already-stellar Esotar 2i to a full-on Esotar 3, also found in the Heritage Collection and our top-of-the-tree Confidence range. It has improved motor and spider designs, and its crossover has been given a full makeover. Everything from resistors and capacitors to internal cabling and even wire coils has been given a boost.

Contour 20 Black Edition will be available in a mirror-like Black High Gloss finish, which nicely complements the black anodised baffle and the new black powder-coated tweeter front-plate and mid/bass-driver basket.

Contour 20 Black Edition is the apex of 40 years of Contour.

We’ve taken every component and upgraded it. Every nuance and improved it. And every surface and made it black.

Heights of perfection

Good engineers aren’t happy unless they’re unhappy. Not in an existential way; more that it means they’ve found something they want to improve, and the solution is nagging at them. (Although sometimes, of course, that can definitely skirt the edges of an existential wobble…)

They went through it in 2016 when Contour was revamped into its current look. It happened again in 2020, when the family gained the ‘i’ badge after being perked-up by a raft of trickle-down Confidence tech.

And they went through it once more in the months before the first Contour 20 Black Edition rolled off the production line at our factory in Denmark. During development this time, their unhappiness made them extremely happy, because they got to throw the kitchen sink at it.

Box: clever

Contour already had a brilliant foundation. The cabinet construction is stellar: thick, solid and with a shape that minimises unwanted vibrations and standing waves. And the heavy aluminium baffle (which is actually a lot thicker than it looks) does wonders for increasing stability and eliminating diffraction.

So, how do you improve on the rest? You reach into the bag of tricks Dynaudio Labs has been filling up since 1977 and pluck out the best bits of the best bits.

High spirits

Let’s take it from the top. High frequencies are handled by the Esotar 3 tweeter. It comes directly from our flagship Confidence range – and is, quite simply, the best tweeter we’ve ever produced. (So far.)

The soft-dome diaphragm is finished with our DSR coating. It’s a high-precision method, formulated and mixed by hand and applied by robots, that puts the coating at the exactly right density in exactly the right places, so you hear exactly what you’re supposed to hear. Which is exactly what the artist wants. (And while we aren’t allowed to tell you exactly what the DSR coating is, we can tell you what the acronym stands for: Dynaudio Secret Recipe. So now you know.)