Listen to the El Diablos and it’s likely that the first thing to strike you will be their generously proportioned presentation. Whether it’s an acoustic recording or a well-constructed studio session, the Peaks offer up the instruments and performers within a large and impressively defined acoustic space.

The El Diablo’s bandwidth and linearity generate a serious sense of musical substance, while at the same time, the flat impedance characteristic eases the amplifiers’ task, encouraging enthusiastic dynamic tracking and temporal security. The Peaks sound remarkably agile and responsive to input, given their middling sensitivity. The bandwidth delivers a place for everything, the responsive nature puts everything in its place. Combined with their rich tonal palette and the well-developed harmonic envelope that goes with it, they map shifts in musical density and energy with a disarming ease.

Listening to the Peaks gives you a real sense of real people playing real instruments, the way they vary their input and the way that the affects the energy generated. You hear it in the texture and attack of violins and the embouchure of a horn player. You hear it in the woody, sawing texture of bowed double bass and the quivering membrane that is a timpani’s skin. But perhaps you hear it most of all in the diction and articulation, phrasing and intent of vocalists.

From here – the top to bottom linearity and balanced energy, the integrated musical coherence and lack of exaggeration, the overall sense of scale and proportion – it’s not too big a leap to understand the Peak’s ability to respond to and lift live albums, to bring the best out of less than stellar records and recordings.

The El Diablo’s ability to bring things together isn’t unique: it’s something it shares with the other Peak speakers! But this latest model, perhaps drawing on the lessons hard learnt not just with the others in the range, but through decades of loudspeaker development, establishes a whole new price/performance high for the brand.

The Dragon Legacy remains an astonishingly listenable and capable speaker. It offers even greater bandwidth and dynamic impact than the El Diablo. But the smaller speaker matches the flagship’s easy expressive range and attractive, natural tonal qualities and separation. It establishes an impressive musical benchmark alongside its more practical attributes. It brings that engaging, almost addictively musical quality to a system: exactly the quality that we are (or should be) looking for – but that’s so hard to find. It really is the baby Dragon. When the El Diablo speaks, it’s easy to listen – and hard not to.

Roy Gregory, Gy8, April 2025