Do you have trouble discerning what upgrades we've put into Contour 20 Black Edition, improving upon the existing model? Wonder no more! The words "new and improved" get thrown around a lot, but in this episode of Ask The Expert we want to show you that not all Contour 20s are created equal! Get ready for a grand tour of Contour 20 Black Edition, and how it differs from its predecessor.
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The inspiration for this episode arose from the above question and – spoiler alert – the answer is "no." But, despite this rather curt answer, the question does make for an interesting discussion and begs further investigation in the form of a like-for-like comparison between Contour 20i and Contour 20 Black Edition. So without further ado, this is how improved upon an improvement!
Let's start by talking about what these speakers actually are. In 2016 we introduced a new version of the Contour line with the curved cabinets and the aluminium front baffle, which completely redefined what Contour speakers are. In 2020 we updated this, resulting in a series that became the Contour i series. Among that series was of course, the Contour 20i. This speaker had updated drivers, updated crossovers, various benefits, but at the same price level as the original version.
Contour 20i has a really dense MDF cabinet, composing 18 millimetre MDF sides and a dual 18 millimetre front, and on this front we have an aluminium front baffle where upon the drivers are actually mounted. The front baffle is designed to look like a very slim piece of aluminium, but in reality it's a 14mm piece of solid aluminium – so a very dense piece of aluminium – and it's bolted to the MDF cabinet which causes both parts to eliminate each others' resonances. So we have a very solid, very dense construction that creates a really good base for the loudspeaker and, once we put in a few really good drivers, you have a fantastic loudspeaker.
So with the contour 20 Black Edition, what we did was take a look at that speaker and think "Okay, we have a really good cabinet, and a really good baffle construction. What could we do if we ignored cost limits and just tried to make the best speaker possible based on this existing cabinet and baffle combination?" And that's exactly what we did!
So, while the Contour 20i and the contour 20 Black Edition may look very similar from the front, you can already detect differences from the back side of the cabinet: Contour 20i has a smaller hole for the bass port. Contour 20 Black Edition, although based on the same cabinet, has a much larger bass port. The reason for this is we start out with the same basic cabinet, but as you can see, the hole for the bass port is much larger. This allows for greater airflow, greater sensitivity, and a better dynamic range in the speaker. This doesn't necessarily mean that the speaker can go lower, but it does result in a higher quality of bass, meaning that there is a greater clarity in the music in the bass region.
Speaking of bass… the bass driver, i.e the woofer for Contour 20i has a very large ferrite magnet. It's very powerful and it allows the speaker to perform at very low frequencies, but it's also designed to have a great mid-range performance, so in a two way speaker it will work really well together with the tweeter.
In contrast, the woofer for the Contour 20 Black Edition is a much smaller-looking woofer. This is due to us wanting to make a larger and more powerful magnet for greater sensitivity but then running into the issue that the even larger magnet was blocking the airflow behind the driver, which created unwanted distortion. The solution to this problem was to use a neodymium magnet instead, which is a compact but more powerful magnet. This allowed us to create a more aerodynamic profile for the woofer within the cabinet, and increase the sensitivity and the dynamics of the driver, whilst not risking unwanted distortion due to potential restricted airflow.
Moving on to the tweeter, Contour 20i features what we call the Esotar2i. This tweeter is what we consider to be our second best tweeter today, and is optimised for giving the best possible performance within a certain price ratio. This tweeter has a very powerful neodymium magnet and has a nice rear chamber, and was designed specifically for the Contour i series.
So the solution to improving on our second-best tweeter was simple: we go to the very best one we have, the Esotar3. This is exactly the same tweeter that we use in all our reference speakers – the Confidence series, the Heritage series, and also the new M4 studio monitors. They all use the Esotar3 tweeter and now, so does Contour 20 Black Edition.
So one of the most important changes to this speaker is actually the crossover. The crossover in any speaker is something that we consider to be the heart of the speaker, since it's where the majority of the tuning work is done to make sure that the drivers work together to give the best sound performance possible.
Contour 20i has a really good crossover. It's built around a second order crossover, but with some extra components that control the phase response and the impedance response, ensuring great performance and good driver cohesion within the cabinet.
For Contour 20 Black Edition, we made one of the crossovers that we are probably the most proud of, because we were able to simplify the crossover. The simpler the crossover, the fewer components there are, and the better the sound quality is. With Contour 20 Black Edition, there are a lot fewer components in the crossover. It is still a second order crossover, but is has been done a little differently: it's not a traditional Butterworth, Linkwitz-Riley or any other type of standard filter, but rather a filter designed specifically for Contour 20 Black Edition.
When you do a second order crossover, you can put the two filters closer or further away from each other to create different slopes for each driver, which affects the total bass response, as well as the off-axis response. By creating what is essentially two first order filters – that are combined but further away from each other than normal – we were able to create a crossover that delivers a better phase response and a better off axis response, whilst using fewer components.
The sum of all of these changes is a speaker that has better sensitivity, better dynamics, lower distortion, and a more clear and authentic representation of your music – all in all, a clearly optimised performance.
And in an attempt to answer the original question, the answer is a resounding "no." As we can see from today's episode, there are simply too many things that need to be changed and upgraded, therefore rendering this practice impractical.