The Peak Consult Dragon Legacy Loudspeaker
By Roy Gregory
It’s common to describe designing loudspeakers as the ultimate audio balancing act. The would-be builder needs to consider interlocking parameters: sensitivity, bandwidth and size (or more properly, internal volume). You can’t alter one without impacting the others. If you want more sensitivity you are going to have to make the box bigger or lose bandwidth. More bandwidth? That will cost you a bigger box or lower sensitivity. Juggling these parameters is no easy task but it is essential to any successful speaker design – especially when you’ve also got drive characteristics, component consistency, build costs (how much gets spent on the cabinet, how much on drivers or crossover and how much on finishing and ancillaries) and a host of intangibles lurking in the background. All of which made the arrival of the Peak Consult Dragon Legacy a particularly fascinating prospect. Not because of the anticipated performance – which certainly lived up to expectations – but because of the uncanny physical similarity the speaker bears to another of my favourites, the Stenheim Reference Ultime 2. That despite the fact that the two speakers offer a very different balance of electrical and sonic characteristics indeed! So – what price those difficult design decisions and what are their musical implications.
Okay, so I know that the U2s are made of metal and feature a pan flat profile, whichever way you look at them, while the Dragon Legacy’s rather more sculpted appearance is constructed entirely from wood. But get past that material difference and the similarities are stark.
The back edge of the Dragon Legacy stands 172cm tall, although the top of the baffle is nearer 167cm: the U2 stands 153.5cm (but you can add at least another 15cm for the X-base, lifting it to an overall height of around 168cm).
The Dragon Legacy is 40cm wide and 58cm deep: the U2 is 37cm wide and 50.5cm deep. But let’s not forget that the Dragon Legacy’s cabinet walls are 5cm thick, meaning that although the U2 is slightly smaller overall, its thin-wall construction actually contains a slightly greater internal volume.
The Dragon Legacy uses two 11” bass drivers, two 5.5” midrange units and a soft-dome tweeter: the U2 uses a soft-dome tweeter, two 6” midrange units and two 12” bass drivers. Both speakers use sophisticated, modern paper cones mated to soft-dome tweeters.
Both speakers are three-way D’Appolito designs with vertically mirror-imaged baffles. Both speakers have a segmented internal structure with six separate chambers individually loading their drivers and isolating their crossover. Both speakers are reflex loaded, each bass driver having its own, rear-firing port.
Despite their different cabinet materials, both speakers tip the scales at a shade over 225kg.
Put them side-by-side and whilst this clearly isn’t a case of classic ‘separated at birth’ common DNA, the shared design themes are clearly and strikingly apparent. Which makes the differences all the more fascinating…
