One thing that has changed on the outside, is the range of available finishes. Peak’s wooden cabinetry is an artisan work of art, reminiscent of early (and still the most attractive) Sonus Fabers. The Walnut and Wenge options are still available, offset by black acrylic contrast panels on the sides. But now the cabinet surfaces can also be ordered in all-over acrylic, with black or white offered as standard. Not only does this offer all the aesthetic appeal of piano finishes, it’s a lot more cosmetically resilient and easier to care for. What’s more, you can specify any alternative acrylic shade – a special order but normally at no extra cost. Finally, there’s the option to replace the contrast panels with carbon-fibre, although that does cost more. What impact do the various finish options have on the sound of the speaker? Given that they amount to a whole lot more than a simple lick of paint, I’d be surprised if there isn’t some sonic influence, although I’m in no position to speculate as to what it might be. The review pair was in the Walnut finish, both looking and sounding just fine.
On the inside, it’s all change.
Although the original El Diablo design received an initial update, launched in May 2021, an update that introduced the current driver line-up and other internal tweaks, what we have here is a more complete redesign, bringing the speaker into line with the other Peak models, and incorporating lessons learnt from the design of the Dragon Legacy. Although the drive units are unchanged, the El Diablo has been completely re-voiced, with changes to the reflex loading, crossover topology and components. The basic slopes remain phase-coherent second order, but a lot of attention has gone into refining the response of the system and the behaviour and impact of the crossover itself. More significantly, subtle shaping of the speaker’s phase response has angled the bass output upwards and away from the floor boundary, rather than the more popular voicing that angles it down, to augment the bottom end. The El Diablo’s bottom end heft needs no help! Another result of the work on low-frequency linearity is improvements in the cabinet bracing to further tune and stiffen the enclosure, while the revised bass alignment has also mandated changes to the internal damping.
That might sound like a tweak here and a tweak there, but the sonic and musical impact of the changes is profound, the new El Diablo being significantly more articulate and faster on its feet than previous versions. It’s almost like somebody took their foot off the speaker’s throat, allowing it to breathe and emote. If it had hands, it would have developed extravagant gestures to underline its musically emphatic delivery. As it is, you’ll need to rely on your ears – not that it’s going to be too hard to figure out!
What three words?
So – you are supposed to be able to define any specific location with ‘just three words.’ Can you define a loudspeaker’s sonic and musical ‘position’, it’s character and qualities, in the same way? That might be pushing it a bit, but when it comes to the El Diablo, how about: Expansive, Expressive and (not)Explicit? Hey – if you make the rules you get to cheat a bit. But as far as they go, these three observations do a good job of capturing what makes the El Diablo distinctive and special. Admittedly, I was tempted to go for Expiratory – just to keep the alliteration going, but it’s not exactly mainstream. (Not) Expensive could be an option too, given the performance, the hand-built, hand finished nature of the cabinet and the overall attention to detail, but given the price of the El Diablo that might be considered anywhere between fanciful and actively misleading: Bit Of A Bargain doesn’t have quite the same ring…
