This type may be only new to me, but with the XK's tendency for road noise, it may be an interesting buy.
It's called ContiSilent, and claims to drop road noise by 9dB, which, if you remember your physics class, is almost reducing generated tire noise by half.
About a 8% premium over a non-Contisilent comparative by the same manufacturer.
Has anyone tried them? Know anyonw who has?

Thanks

 

Nice. New to me too. I just loaded up on Bridgestone's last fall so I won't be trying these anytime soon.

 

I'm either at Full Throttle or stopped at a light or sign, so I don't know if my tires are loud.

Really I do though... even with the top down I don't notice any tire noise anyway. It may be there, but nothing that even lightly grabs my attention.

 

Big part of it is the pavement type.

On clean asphalt, it's not bad.

But the major highways around south Florida use a coarse surface mixture, probably to help traction during heavy rain at high speed.

The roar from it is loud enough to make conversation very hard at 80 mph with my Michelin Pilot Sports. Concrete and particularly grooved surfaces are awful.

I plan on CLD'ing my shock towers soon, which may reduce vibration -- but I'm told that CLD (constrained layer damping) doesn't have a lot of effect on road noise.

 

If you compare the tires on Tire Rack to the other Continental tires, the DWS06+ seems to be higher rated in almost every category, and is currently cheaper. The load/speed rating is higher on the DWS tires which interesting. I have the old DWS06 tires, and the noise is much better than the Bridgestone tires I replaced.

 

Ugh... these look like runflat tires as well (much less likely to be repairable if punctured) :
https://continentaltire.com/tires/procontact-rx

Even the ratings on the Continental site are pretty bad.

 

Nobody wants a really quiet XKR. I bet you can't hear any difference if you removed Fuse 19.

 

My Buick TourX came with the Conti-Silents.... In Jan at 42k I had to replace them as a chunk of foam dislodged and the tire wobbled like it had thrown all of its balancing weights. Scary at speed.
I replaced the TourX's with Conti's ProContacts... In the two months of ownership and a roundtrip to Florida, I don't notice any difference in sound. Zero.

Last year I replaced the cat's shoes with Cont Extreme Contact Sport (summer). If they make any noise, I can't hear it. Could it be my ear-to-ear grin is suppressing my hearing?

 

Checked with Tirerack because neither page said runflat. They said neither the RX or TX in my size are runflats. Directed to the Conti URL you posted, the rep said some sizes are runflat, but not the sizes XKs use.

But between the apparent fragility of these in Tirerack reviews, and Scott's review of problems as well as no audible difference in noise plus foam delamination, above, I've got a good enough answer to pass on them.

I'll stick to the Extreme Contact 6 when reshoeing comes around.

Thanks!

 

Agreed, but have to hear the road noise in my XK to believe it. Only on the local interstates. My wife and I have to shout (and we're not even arguing...)

 

To be clear, the only problem I had with them occurred at 42,000 miles. And they are were on my station wagon. In my opinion the Extreme's are the way to go, but I doubt the mileage will be anywhere close to the Silents.