Dynaudio Senior Acoustics Engineer Stephen Entwistle takes us behind the scenes with the development of the new Emit range.
The concept behind Dynaudio’s new Emit range
With the new Emit models, we wanted to elevate the performance of the out going Emit speakers with improvements we’ve made to our drivers, while still keeping the price at a more affordable level.
Design principles
For the new Emits, we followed the same design ideals we apply to all of our speakers:
- Solve as many issues as we can with driver and cabinet design
- Use only the required filtering, keeping things as simple as possible, but with the freedom to do what’s necessary to make it work
Party of five, the new Dynaudio Emit range
Updated tech
We deliberately kept close to the performance of the outgoing series (after all it’s an award winning range), but we wanted to improve the experience for the listener, to give a more refined taste of what hifi sound performance can deliver.
It’s safe to say that we’ve improved our drivers in all areas in this regard, from our resonance-defeating Hexis inner dome, to our smaller voice coils. We’ve also departed from our traditional aluminium voice coils to give us a broader range of materials, so we can select the coil material that gives us the best performance in the most appropriate driver.
In some places the crossovers are more complex and in others they are simpler because, again, we’ve given ourselves the freedom to use the topology that gives us the best performance.
The Emit tweeter disassembled, showing its Hexis inner dome (top left) that aids dispersion
Dynaudio DNA
We needed to move production away from Denmark, mainly from a logistics and capacity point of view. Some of our customers see this as a disadvantage or that Dynaudio is ‘selling out’, but the reality is that we simply don’t have the production capacity to make the Emit series in Denmark.
We have spent just as much engineering time and effort in Denmark on the Emits as we would on any of our other speakers wherever they are made. It’s the same Mechanical, Electronic & Acoustic Engineers working on the Emit series as for the Confidence series of speakers. We’ve worked hard to maintain the ‘Dynaudio quality’, not just here in Denmark but also with our China based team, to deliver a speaker that’s affordable yet still represents the authentic Dynaudio experience which is “the way the artist intended”.
Dynaudio Emit 20 in walnut finish
We made the decision to use a laminate (or vinyl) wrap for the Emits’ cabinets and steel baskets for the drivers, giving us more flexibility for the component selection in the crossover.
The tweeter coil/dome (we call it the butterfly) assembly is made in Denmark and follows the same process as all of our hifi tweeters. The Emits’ cones and surrounds for the woofer/mid-woofers/mid-range drivers are the same as those in our other speaker ranges.
Keeping things simple
I think the Emit series truly embodies the Dynaudio experience in how we’ve kept things as simple as we can. Specifically aiming for a 1st order filter for all the tweeters in the series for example. We’re using the same materials for our domes and driver cones as we’ve done for many years, not just because of the legacy, but because when we try to move away from them we find that they still offer the superior performance we are looking for and other materials simply operate in a different way.
An Emit 50 midrange unit and woofer internals
We’ve worked hard to give the whole range a familiarity. No matter which speaker you choose, you will get the same Dynaudio Emit experience, just with different levels of SPL and extension, which should make the range ideal for building a home cinema set up around too.
I often say that less expensive speakers are ‘more fun’ to work on, as I like the challenge of squeezing every last ounce of performance from a loudspeaker during its development. Less expensive speakers also often have very limiting budget constraints, which means that making the right choices, in some ways, can be more critical than in the more expensive speakers. Not that developing more expensive speakers is easy! The performance expectation we put on ourselves is always to deliver the best in class performance. Higher-end ranges are fun in different ways, allowing more freedom brings other challenges and rewards, but with the Emit series I think we can all be proud of the level of performance we’ve achieved together.
