Even the most cursory glance at the Dynaudio Confidence 60 — or indeed any model in the Confidence range — will reveal the most significant difference between this series and the one that preceded it. Whereas all models in the out-going range had two tweeters, the models in this series have only a single tweeter.
Losing the second tweeter proved to be a hugely divisive move within this Danish company. Dynaudio’s marketing department wanted the new range to have two tweeters, just like the previous one, arguing that ‘customers would expect it’ whereas the engineers had discovered that switching to just a single — albeit far higher-performance — tweeter and adding an acoustics lens resulted in a superior design. As you can see, the engineers won out in the end, but the background to the story is truly fascinating... as you will discover.
THE MISSING TWEETER
To understand why the Dynaudio Confidence 60 has only a single tweeter, and why the marketing department was fighting with the engineering department, you first have to understand why the model it replaces (the C4) had two tweeters. It all has to do controlling the directivity of the loudspeaker.
When a loudspeaker diaphragm (be it a cone or dome) creates sound by moving back and forth which compresses and rarefies the air in front of it, the sound radiates outwards fairly evenly in all directions. The level of sound is greatest directly in front of the driver (on-axis) and the degree with which the level drops off as you move off to one side or the other (that is, off-axis horizontally) or up and down (off-axis vertically) varies with both the design of the driver itself and the frequency of the sound being reproduced. As a general rule, the levels of high-frequencies drop off more rapidly off-axis than the levels of low-frequencies.
In a room, this means that at some point, the sound wave created by the driver will reach one of a room’s six boundaries
