I bit the bullet and made the jump from a life of budget and mid-range tires to a premium offering for the first time with these tires, and my initial impressions are great. Worth every cent, hands down.
When cruising around and taking it easy, the road noise of this tire is lower than I've experienced with any other tire I've run on two different cars. There certainly is some noise, but it's not loud and fades into the background. The tires also just ride quite smooth, I'm confident passengers would not know I have a performance oriented tire if I'm taking it easy.
Dry performance is impressive, especially with some very cold temperatures lately where I'm running these in Wisconsin. We had a day or two of -5F (-20C) temperatures, and these tires still grip well, launching well from a stop and inspiring confidence when being thrown through curves. Grip only goes up from here as temperatures rise, above freezing, I'm unable to kick in traction control when launching from a stop at all.
What really impressed me is that in wet conditions, and with light snow/slush on the road, the tires didn't seem to care. I hardly had to adjust my driving habits, and it was easy to tell if you started to approach the limit, but they still felt solid.
These tires did struggle a little bit with ice, but they were still significantly better than anything else I've run, and recovered from slides quickly. The slides were also very predictable.
Moving from some generic budget/mid-range tires to these, one thing I also noticed is that all my older ones started to feel less planted as you approach and exceed 100mph (160kph). These feel glued to the road even at these speeds, and I have even made an emergency swerve at this speed with zero hesitation, no loss of grip, and great precision. All in Mexico, and allegedly, of course.
If you make one modification to your car, and don't want to swap wheels for winter/summer, get yourself a set of tires like these. I don't feel like I'm making any compromises for any conditions, and the fact that Continental pulled that off amazes me.