The history of Dynaudio is complicated and fascinating.
The origins of Dynaudio are in Israel, under the Morel banner which still exists.
Both Dynaudio and Morel were principally driver companies, and were a major source of OEM drivers, and I bought plenty.
The founder of Morel in Israel was Meir Mordechai. He partnered with two Danes in 1975 forming Dynaudio,
Ejvind Skaaning and
Gerhard Richter.
All three retained patents. They were superb drivers, especially their mid range D 75 Dome. In my view this is the finest midrange driver ever produced. It easily handles a band from 400 Hz to 5 KHz and is easy to design crossovers for.
I personally own 18 Dynaudio drivers from that era, of which 14 are in daily use. I have four in my larger monitors I used to use for live recording. These are boxed up currently.
In the early eighties I had prolonged correspondence with Ejvind Skaaning. No email then, mail only. We shared a lot design ideas. That was the time of the coherent speaker design craze. So I designed my studio monitors for my editing and mastering studio. Well, it was all very difficult because of driver overlap. That was the most difficult design I ever did. At the same time Dynaudio designed their Conquest with first order crossovers.
The woofer is at the top and the tweeter at the bottom. This because of the 15 degree axis tilt of odd order crossovers.
I decided to make a tall column so I could have the tweeter at the top. I also cheated a little as I wanted to use two KEF B 139s in each speaker. This necessitated an active third order crossover to the Dynaudio mid at 180 Hz.
Those speakers were the most difficult to get right, because of the overlap of first order crossovers. I bet it was four years at least before I was really happy with them.
However there is a funny story, about this. I and the Dynaudio team met up at an audio show at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.
Now because of the axis tilt, those speakers made it sound as if the music was coming up out of the floor! They became the butt of quite a few jokes over this, but took it all in good part. That is why my speakers are the way they are, so the sound filed is very natural, directed down to the listening position.
Of course this was all really a dead end, as the spacing of the drivers actually puts the "kibosh" on the coherent phase theory, unless the driver was coaxial. Thiel was a proponent of this phase coherent theory.
Unfortunately the Danish owners of Dynaudio wanted to retire and the company was bought by GoerTek Inc. of Weifang China in 2014. So Dynaudio is a Chinese company now. The Dynaudio drivers prior to the sale to Goer Tek used 2.5" voice coils, and were hard to manufacture.
My former location monitors, now my side surround speakers, use all Dynaudio drivers.
However, all is not lost, as Morel are still making essentially a lot of the same original Dynaudio drivers, as they also hold the patents.
These Morel Bass mids are the basis of our inwall system.
The six bass mids and the center mid are from Morel, and use the original patents shared by Dynaudio and Morel.
One last story. The sale of Dynaudio to the Chinese was coincident with our Lake home remodel, and Ejvind Skaaning made two Dynaudio D76 dome midrange drivers available to me, for my family room speakers. I have since been able to source a good spare on eBay, just in case.
