Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

At first glance, this active, DSP-controlled loudspeaker system, with dynamic drivers firing to front and rear, may seem an alien invader from the world of recording and mastering monitors made by such brands as Neumann and Genelec. I wouldn't dispute that perception, but I offer another perspective: The engineering that has gone into the Dutch & Dutch 8c ($12,500/pair) is an all-out attempt to meet the goals that all designers of high-end speakers hope to attain: wide, smooth frequency response; sufficient and linear dynamic performance; crossover management; a cabinet free of audible resonances and edge diffraction; control of the dispersion of sound energy throughout the audioband.

Everyone knows that a lot of serious music listeners—that is, those who listen to music instead of using it as a conversational background—have neither the space nor the money for a pair of typical floor-standing speakers, and must make do with bookshelf-type systems that are actually small enough to put in a bookshelf. But while the typical audio perfectionist will freely admit that there is a place in the audio sun for these dinky little speakers, he cannot really take them seriously, particularly when they're priced significantly under $100 each.

There's something inherently suspicious about most all-in-one solutions. The audiophile brain, trained over decades of mix-and-match rituals, recoils instinctively. Where's the fun in a speaker that arrives with amplification baked in? Where's the journey of pairing, the thrill of synergy discovered at 2am after your sixth cable swap?

Dynaudio's $2399/pair Contour 1.3 Mk.II follows on from the Mk.I, which grabbed Russ Novak's enthusiastic attention in November 1996 (Vol.19 No.11). Because a full description was included in the original review, I will only touch briefly on the differences between the original version and the sample reviewed this month. A Special Edition of the Contour 1.3 is also available for $3499/pair. Sam Tellig's comments on the sound of this loudspeaker appeared in the December 1999 Stereophile and are included at the end of this review.

Although I have very much appreciated how the best floorstanding loudspeakers have performed in my various listening rooms over the decades, I have always been most comfortable with relatively small two-way standmounts. Back in the early 1980s, I got musically moving sound from a pair of Rogers LS3/5a's, which I still own . . .

I miss the High End Shows. Not the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—no thanks. I can do without the overpriced hotels, the 45-minute taxi lines, the frantic racing from venue to venue. No, it's the Stereophile shows I miss, with the centralized location, the rubbing shoulders with readers ("Hey, you're the cheap-speaker guy! Check out room 206!"), the listening to live music, and maybe even playing a little of it.

In the March 2010 issue I reviewed Dynaudio's Excite X12 bookshelf speaker ($1200/pair), then the least expensive speaker in Dynaudio's line. It mightily impressed me, and I wrote that it had "become my new benchmark for speakers costing under $2000/pair." Despite the many newer, competing bookshelf speakers costing somewhere between $1000 and $2000/pair that have visited my listening room since then, my enthusiasm for the Excite X12 has not waned—I've used it as a reference against which to compare all of those of those models. So when Dynaudio USA's Michael Manousselis contacted Stereophile to tell us that the entire Excite line had been redesigned, and offered review samples of the Excite X12's successor, the Excite X14 ($1500/pair), I jumped at the opportunity.