In this episode of Ask The Expert, Otto explains the key differences between the Contour and the Contour i series. Spolier alert: there's a lot.
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In the 2020 Contour i series, we made upgrades more or less across the board, and part of the reason for this was new developments in driver technology.
One example of these new developments is the Hexis dome in the tweeter. We developed Hexis for the Confidence and Evoke series, and wanted to include that innovation in the Contour i series as well.
At the same time, we updated most of the woofers for the Contour i series, as well as some improvements in the fine tuning of the cabinet. The crossovers were then also updated to reflect those changes in cabinets and drivers.
When you put all of these smaller changes together, the result is a big step up in terms of performance. So, although they look very similar (the 2016 Contour series and the 2020 Contour i series) more or less all of the key parts have been updated for the i-series to allow for better performance.
When we develop a speaker, as soon as we change one detail, the whole balance of the speaker becomes affected. So we more or less have to start over, look at all of the different components, and rebalance everything so that the end result works perfectly.
We can't just update one component and call that an improvement – a complete upgrade requires a lot of small changes in almost every aspect of the system. That's exactly what we did with Contour i.