The sound of the Essence amps is easy to describe, growing as it does directly from the musically fertile roots of the Diablo 120 integrated. Essence by name and Essence by nature, these amps embody all the energy, presence and musical purpose that make the Diablo 120 so listenable – and add considerably to the mix, with increased dynamic and spatial resolution, more musical and rhythmic articulation, greater harmonic range and texture. Combined those qualities with the considerable body and presence of the integrated and you’ve got an amp that’s direct, warm and engaging yet still manages to communicate with seriously impressive weight, drive and impact. This is one pre/power that grabs hold and holds on – to both the music and the listener.
Logically, you might think that there should be a continuum that runs from warm, rounded, soft and syrupy smooth all the way through to etched, bleached, pared-away and stilted, with products arranged nice and neatly somewhere along that line. In practice, those extremes are fundamentally distinct. It’s not a case of each being right in different ways, more a case of both being wrong – with the things that one extreme gets right the other eliminating almost entirely. Along the way, both also reduce the communicative qualities and expressive range that make music (in whatever form) such a ubiquitous part of the human condition.
Think instead of an amorphous blob, a swirl of often-competing virtues and qualities that mill around a stationary centre, the point at which everything falls into balance. Too much of any one thing and your product gets pulled off to one side, the distance it is removed from that central ideal depending on the type of music and its demands. With so many different qualities in tension, it’s little wonder that the serene state of perfect balance seems so unattainable. When it comes to recorded music, resolution and relative location matter, as do pitch, pace and harmonic identity. But amps that do all of those things (and do them all equally well) are rare indeed – and system’s even rarer. The Diablo 120 may not do everything on that list. It definitely leans towards a warmer, more rounded and less explicit presentation. But crucially, it still gets the energy in the right place, at the right time and (even more crucially) delivers enough of it. It succeeds not by doing everything equally well, but getting the important things right, by having a highly developed set of musical priorities. It captures instrumental and vocal character and it imbues them with a convincing and communicative presence. It captures the chemistry and human element that binds a performance. It captures the energy that brings that performance to life. The Essence amps do all of that, but they do more besides, adding extra insight, focus, transparency, resolution, dynamic range and bandwidth to the solid structure established by the 120. This isn’t so much a case of putting flesh on the musical bones, but bringing muscular definition and a sculptor’s sense of surface texture to proceedings.
