The Peak Consult El Diablo Loudspeaker
By Roy Gregory
Peak Consult is both a new brand and an older establish one, just as this El Diablo is both a new speaker and an old and well recognised model. Peak – the company – was founded in 1996 and quickly established a reputation for its excellent cabinet work and robust sound quality. But by the 2020s the business was all but moribund, passed over by changing audio fashions, with the move to higher-tech enclosure materials and higher-tech drivers. That is, until it was rejuvenated by external investment (from, amongst others, Wilfried Ehrenholz – the man who built Dynaudio into a global loudspeaker power house) and expertise (on the organizational and developmental sides). The result was a remarkable resurgence, a small range of speakers that, despite their ambitious goals and pricing, quickly established themselves as serious competitors in a crowded marketplace. We’ve already reviewed the impressive Sinfonia and mighty Dragon Legacy models, both of which have become price/performance benchmarks. Now comes perhaps the most interesting model in this increasingly interesting range.
The El Diablo has long been a staple in the Peak Consult range and was, for many years, their most successful, popular and recognisable model. It’s not hard to understand why. It follows a blueprint first stamped on the audio public’s consciousness by the Wilson WATT/Puppy: Big enough to deliver convincing bandwidth, compact enough to actually accommodate, a three-way, twin-bass driver topology built into a reflex loaded cabinet that promised impressive dynamic response. It’s a winning formula that’s been exploited by companies as varied as B&W and Magico, KEF and Coincident Technology and, although you can argue about who or what came first, there’s no questioning the enduring influence of the Wilson design. But while the current Sasha V sits atop the $50k mark (and is being handily undercut and undermined in performance terms by the new $40k WATT/Puppy Anniversary model) the price-point the compact floor-stander used to dominate has moved onward and upwards.
These days, the keenest competition is between boxes in the sub-$100k category. Wilson has its own dog in that fight, the $70k-$80k (depending on finish) Alexia V, although it’s a model that has (to me at least) always sat uncomfortably between the W/P and the post-MAXX Alexx, bastard off-spring of a multi-box marketing imperative rather than a clear design choice. There are plenty of listeners who disagree with me on that one, but to them I say, listen to the Stenheim Alumine 5 SE/SX – or the latest El Diablo. The revised Peak play-maker may have taken its time to appear, but it was well worth the wait. At €65,000 a pair (including sales tariff – I mean tax) it’s also just about within reach of mere mortals, a price that also makes it significantly cheaper than most of the serious competition. Representing the same steps forward in musical and rhythmic coherence, natural tonality and dynamic expression that make the Sinfonia and Dragon Legacy models that flank it so musically engaging, the newly minted El Diablo also adds a few tricks of its own.
Appearances can be reassuring – and deceptive…
Outwardly at least, the El Diablo looks pretty much identical to its previous self. But like Dr. Who, the origin story might be the same but the character is entirely new. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, is an adage that could usefully be applied rather more often in the audio world. It’s a lesson that Peak Consult’s design team has clearly taken to heart. The sculpted enclosure and facetted baffle remain untouched, painstakingly constructed from three layers of laminated 12mm HDF, bonded with a lossy adhesive and covered with a 14mm layer of hardwood/acrylic, for a total wall thickness of 50mm. I’ve covered the cabinet construction (and the company’s rejuvenation) in detail, in previous articles (https://gy8.eu/review/leaning-in/ and https://gy8.eu/blog/summit-meeting/ ) so I’m not going to labour the point here, but this is an excellent example of the high-mass approach to the management and dissipation of unwanted energy in loudspeaker cabinets. Anything but brute-force, it’s a thoughtful application of different materials and exhaustively selected adhesives arrived at through years of empirical experiment.
