What does that custom contour switch on the back do? Why is this different from what other speaker companies do?

Listening room acoustics are more varied than ever before considering today’s vast volume of furnishing and architectural design possibilities. This can make the task of setting up a pair of floor standing speakers for music in a room quite difficult. It is not likely that a customer will be willing to spend money on expensive room treatment, so the next best thing is to provide the customer with additional help to initially set up their loudspeaker– hence the attenuator switch. The attenuator switch provides users the ability to slightly reduce the mid & high frequencies in rooms that contain a lot of hard-flat surfaces. The attenuation is not drastic, and you may not immediately notice it, but it does just enough to reduce the high–frequency energy in any room. Overall, the switch improves the balance between the low frequencies (those that are more influenced by the position of the speaker in the room) and the high frequencies (those that are sensitive to the liveness or deadness of the listening space).