Edgar Kramer of SoundStage! Australia was taking notes on the Confidence 20 when he realized he had written "sweet, sweet, sweet" about its tweeter. That tweeter is Dynaudio's idea in miniature. The Danish company makes every part of its drivers itself, down to magnetizing the magnets and winding the coils. The tweeter is a soft fabric dome with a coating Dynaudio keeps secret, and the company prefers it to metal for a more even sound. The woofer cones are a polymer blend Dynaudio molds in one piece, shaped so the sound off to the side stays close to the sound in front. Steve Guttenberg hears the Contour 20i's highs as "so pure," with no strain as the volume climbs, and Andrew Robinson calls the Evoke 20 "one of the more effortlessly listenable loudspeakers that I have ever heard." Dynaudio suits listeners who play long sessions and want detail without edge.

The range climbs from Emit through Evoke and Contour to Confidence, and good ideas from the top reach the cheaper models. The Emit 20 is the place to start, and its tweeter is borrowed from the flagship Confidence. The Special Forty is the step up, a What Hi-Fi? award winner that the magazine found easy for most amplifiers to drive. These speakers reward an amplifier with good current more than one with lots of watts. Robinson named the Cambridge Audio AXR100, Audiolab 6000A and Musical Fidelity M5si as standouts with the Evoke 20. Give the rear ports some space. Jason Kennedy of Hi-Fi+ set the Emit 20 40 cm from the wall, and Robinson's rule is to pull the speaker out until the bass almost disappears, then walk it back. If you want a system with no separate amplifier, the active Focus 30 can add Dirac Live room correction, which Gordon Brockhouse of SoundStage! Simplifi called transformative.

Wilfried Ehrenholz was 22 and had just finished his studies when he started Dynaudio in 1977 in Skanderborg, a small Danish town by a lake. "When I think back, I can't understand how I have been so brave!" he said later. The first speakers put other companies' drivers into tweaked cabinets with crossovers made in-house, and before long the company began building its own. By the late 1980s Dynaudio was supplying drivers to other makers, Kramer remembers. The Confidence line dates from 1991, and anniversary editions mark the decades, among them the Special Twenty-Five and the Special Forty, which John Atkinson of Stereophile first heard at AXPONA and wrote "The stereo image was superb." In 2016 Dynaudio opened Jupiter, a huge measuring room where an arm of 31 microphones measures a speaker all the way around before any wall reflection arrives, a long way from the tweaked cabinets of 1977.