Dynaudio Contour Legacy - Floorstanding Speakers

The Dynaudio Contour Legacy is a beautiful floor-standing 2.5-way speaker that echoes the look of 2020’s best-selling Heritage Special. It tips a nod to the original Contour speakers from the 1980s and 90s, while bringing everything up to date with Dynaudio’s latest driver know-how and acoustic technology.

It uses Dynaudio’s top-level 28mm Esotar 3 soft-dome tweeter (including the Hexis resonance-defeating inner dome); dual 18cm woofers derived from the classic Evidence range (then tweaked and souped-up to an even more amazing level); plus a beautifully elegant crossover packed with select premium components.

Contour Legacy is hand-made at Dynaudio’s headquarters in Skanderborg, Denmark. It’s finished in sustainable American Walnut, with each piece of veneer carefully chosen and matched for every individual speaker (when you see them, you’ll realise just how well-spent that time was). The production-run is limited to 1000 pairs worldwide; each comes with its own pair number for posterity.

Remastering a Classic

Contour Legacy is an intentional homage to the late, great Contour 1.8, so you might already be expecting a listening experience that’s a trip down memory lane. Or Penny Lane.

Beneath that chocolate brown American Walnut veneer lives a totally different generation of technology. The original drivers and electronics from the elder Contour have been replaced by components that look superficially familiar, but sound substantially better.

As a Contour Legacy owner, you have permission to feel nostalgic but modern – whether you’re streaming or lowering a stylus.

Dynaudio sound engineers had two demanding critics to impress. Their ears.

Curves and bends have found their way into the shapes of modern Dynaudio speakers, shaping and controlling pressure-waves, reflections, refractions… smoothly guiding sound to its smiling, satisfied destination.

But part of what makes the Contour Legacy so comforting and familiar is its old-school, rectangular format. So, how did Dynaudio's R&D team get around this obstacle and still deliver such outstanding results?

They modified the woofers from the Evidence Platinum, placing them in parallel, with the lower one increasing the sensitivity of its upper neighbour – so the upper driver handles midrange and bass, while the lower one just handles bass. Which meant they needed to design a higher impedance voice coil. Which meant no crossover was available off the shelf to orchestrate this idiosyncratic selection – so the team designed one from scratch, including capacitors and connecting wiring from Europe’s finest manufacturers, including Duelund, Mundorf and Van den Hul.

Then they crowned it with our legendary Esostar 3 tweeter. A tweeter that needs no introduction here.

From concept to engineering model to verification and prototypes – with all the tweaking and modification in between – Dynaudio sound tuners spend approximately two weeks listening per iteration.

In fact, around 70 per cent of the modifications to a loudspeaker such as Contour Legacy are done as the result of listening, rather than looking at data.

At the end of the day, regardless of a loudspeaker’s raison d'être, it’s in the sweet spot where the real verdict is made, and that’s where the Contour Legacy will leave a lasting one.

Technical Specifications

• Sensitivity (dB @ 2.83V/1m): 90
• IEC Power Handling (W): 200
• Rated Impedance (Ohm): 4
• Lower Cutoff (Hz @ +/- 3 dB): 42
• Upper Cutoff (kHz @ +/- 3 dB): 29
• Box Principle: Bass reflex rear ported
• Crossover: 2.5-way
• Crossover Frequency (Hz): 3400 Hz
• Crossover Topology: 1st/2nd order
• Tweeter: 28 mm Esotar 3
• Woofer: 2x 18cm MSP cone
• Weight: 32.5kg
• Dimensions (W x H x D): 208 x 995 x 345mm

Further Information

Dynaudio Contour Legacy - User Manual (PDF)