The Ditigal Designs 9500 has cooling in the top plate right where the basket mounts to the motor. its has a lower BL because of this but keeps the voice cooler. Also the DD has a multi layer spiders but they are stacked together. The AQ has two layers of spiders. So, it has one layer with a stack of three spiders and a lower layer with a stack of three spiders. Also the AQ has an eight layer flat wound aluminum voice coil where as the DD has a 4 layer roune wire copper wire voice coil. What this means is the AQ has a little les overall power handling then the DD with the difference in the voice coil wire and the top plate venting.