“Best in Show”
The room I liked the most – and what it said about the system and the show.
By Steve Dickinson
Peak Consult, CH Precision, Innuos, Chord, Andante Largo, Reiki Audio and Acouplex
It seems like Peak Consult is on a roll. Having exhibited its flagship Dragon Legacy at Munich in the Gryphon room a couple of years ago, this small Danish loudspeaker manufacturer took a sound cabin in Munich last year (where they paired the El Diablo with CH Precision 1 Series electronics) and took the plunge with a larger room in Vienna. The occasion? The launch of its latest model, the SunFyre, a loudspeaker that strongly resembles a slightly scaled-down Dragon Legacy, at a slightly scaled-down price (€148,000 inc. sales tax, $192,000 USD ex, sales tax).
But what made this room particularly interesting (and successful) is that, as sole key holders and the company footing the entire bill, Peak got to choose everything else in the system on an invitation-only basis. As you might imagine, the partnering equipment was beyond reproach and worth listing in detail:
CH Precision D10, C10, T10 CD/SACD player.
Innuos Nazaré/Flow server and re-clocker (with CH Link-HD direct, native high-res connection to the C10 DAC, keeping file replay away from the network.
CH Precision L10 line-stage and M10 stereo power amp.
Andante Largo Grande Tower racks and amp-stands.
Chord Company Chord Music power, signal, network and speaker cables.
Reiki Audio SuperSwitch X/Pro X PSU (to keep network noise away from the system)
Acouplex Refract panels (for the CH components and under the Reiki boxes), cable risers and ‘locking washers’ on the speakers and power block for the streaming components.
Telos Audio Power Station Tai Chi, power factor correction AC supply, to minimise the impact of the ACV mains quality.
Every connection in the system was also cleaned and treated with Andante Largo’s Super TMD contact cleaner and enhancer – itself no small task.
For me, this was unquestionably the best-sounding room at the show, with a natural and credible sense of scale and mass, neither undersized nor overblown whether it was reproducing a symphony, or a piano-based jazz trio. This was coupled with a fluid, lucid, effortlessly natural delivery that got right to the heart of the music, regardless of genre. If I skimped on attending some Vienna exhibitors, blame the fact that I spent rather more time in the Peak room than I probably should have done. Peak are understandably proud of the SunFyre, and the time they have taken to refine the drivers and component choices in the crossover, not to mention the exquisitely-finished, 5-section cabinets. But the hardware is only half the story.
As RG never tires of saying, setup is as fundamental to the performance of the system as the components themselves and this room was proof positive that set-up requires more than just building the racks, plonking the kit on them, hooking up the cabling, and shuffling the speakers about a bit to get something approaching a decent image.
