A new speaker, new drivers and a whole new sound.
By Roy Gregory
Whatever else happens in Vienna at the 2026 High-End Show (and the auguries aren’t looking great) we’ll witness the emergence of a generational change in the evolving story of Peak Consult, one of the more interesting plot-lines within the closeted world of high-end speaker design.
When the established but ailing Peak brand was acquired in 2018 by Wilfried Ehrenholz (who built and then recently sold Dynaudio) and Lennart Asbjørn it was basically sleepwalking into obscurity. The first order of business was an urgent blood transfusion to reinvigorate the company. Working with existing designs or cabinet concepts, Ehrenholz was quick to recruit the technical expertise of Karl-Heinz Fink (consultant speaker designer to the stars) and along with the company’s original founder, Per Kristoffersen, was soon able to offer three new models (the Sonora, Sinfonia and Dragon Legacy) featuring current thinking and technology to stand alongside the popular, updated El Diablo three-way floor-stander. But, as impressive as they were, these were essentially refined and evolved versions of existing Peak products. In Vienna, we’ll see an entirely new model, signalling the first example of the new team’s design DNA.
Designed to stand between the El Diablo and the flagship Dragon Legacy, the Sunfyre (if you have to ask, you didn’t pay enough attention to Game Of Thrones) is a tall, three-way MTM design, a scaled-down version of the flagship, built on the basis of twin 8” bass units, disposed top and bottom in a symmetrical array. Given the familiar shape of the segmented cabinet, it’s no surprise that this story starts with those drivers, both bass and midrange.
With updated models on the market and reestablishing the brand’s reputation and visibility, the design team was able to spend considerably more time on the next round of product development, opening the way for the ground-up Sunfyre design, starting with the creation of proprietary system-specific, drive-units, developed in close cooperation with specialist manufacturer Audio Technology (who supplied drivers for the current models, with the exception of the Dragon Legacy). With the sectional, segmented cabinet structure already established by the dragon Legacy, the actual construction could be considerably refined, while it also defined the perfect driver characteristics for each separate volume. Starting with existing 5.5” midrange unit, pretty much everything except the driver basket was changed, including the cone profile, spider, suspension, magnet assembly and the position of the coil in the magnetic gap. The result was a completely revised set of electrical parameters and physical characteristics, closely matched to and balanced against the newly developed cabinet and internal volume. The 8” bass driver went through a similar evolution, although in this case, the acoustic system also included careful attention paid to the port tuning.
Combined with the excellent tweeter from the Dragon Legacy, the new drivers and cabinets also demand a completely new crossover, still being finalised as you read this. Component values, type and quality have been exhaustively assessed and compared over hours of careful, comparative listening. Once finalised, the crossover will be carefully transferred to three, separate mounting-boards, laid out to avoid component interaction. These will then be installed in the separate space, built into the speakers base, which will be filled with dried sand for mechanical damping before sealing.
