PEAK CONSULT Legacy Dragon
Floorstanding loudspeakers
What I must appreciate about the flagship product of Peak Consult is that it does not try to come up with unusual solutions at all costs and does not boast about patents; rather it builds on the most basic and well-known principles of speaker construction. It just thinks a bit more about what works and what not. The result is a classic loudspeaker that – sonically - can easily compete with all the industrially modern designs that have recently been the hype in the high-end audio market.
Function and form
The cabinets of the Dragon Legacy are constructed from layered HDF – the sheets of the HDF are laminated atop each other with the help of viscoelastic glue to dampen vibrations. The wall thickness of the boards varies to up to 50mm. After that, the cabinets are made more rigid by internal bracing. The beautiful part of the construction is made from 14mm hard wood and acrylic panels that are bonded to the facets of the speaker. Instead of organic curvatures, the Peak Consult uses many unparallel but flat surfaces, like a diamond.
The company is co-owned by Wilfried Ehrenholz of Dynaudio fame (he left Dynaudio after it had been acquired by Chinese Goertek in 2014) and therefore there is no surprise that we see some elements of Dynaudio shine through the Dragon Legacy. Namely, it is the use of 26mm silk dome tweeter (said to provide a flat frequency response to 30kHz), d´Appolito arrangement of the other drivers (two 15cm paper midrange drivers and two 30cm paper woofers), and the directivity control that eliminates room boundary reflections, but makes the speakers sensitive to placement too.
Peak Consult uses what they call PLIC aka Peak Loudspeaker Impedance Control: The crossover equalizes impedance for the flattest curve possible to relieve amplifiers from unexpected loads. The crossover is mounted on three MDF boards (to separate all three frequency bands) in a sealed, sand-filled chamber to minimise microphonic issues. The Dragon Legacy has an average sensitivity of 90dB, though, and is specified as a 4-ohm speaker. Unlike Dynaudio, which has always disregarded bi-wiring, the Peak Consult is bi-wireable and sources the binding posts from Danish cable specialist, Argento Audio.
Bass management
To convert your room into a music club, the Dragon Legacy are wonderful tools. The electronic glitch hop La Fong (Opiuo) stormed into the listening room with the energy of a PA system and its deep bass pulses made the ceiling acoustic canopies swing and my heart beat a bit faster. On top of that, it is a well-recorded piece of music, so who cares it is not your usual jazz-inspired track? With the same verve and scale, I could savour Madonna’s and Michael Jackson’s tracks. The Dragon Legacy are rhythmically perfect and have excellent dynamics, both micro and macro, which makes them very successful with upbeat music and makes them very good vocal performers too (I’ll be back to it in a minute).
The Dragon Legacy are a living testimony to the fact that size matters; with large cabinets and large drivers the result is not the same as with multiple small drivers in a slim cabinet. Although the summed cone surface may be the same, the difference in perceived sound is remarkable. The sound is less pushed and projected; it just is. However, not all of us have a room that can accommodate such bulky loudspeakers – they are 172cm tall and almost 60cm deep, weighing 225kg each. Make sure that your floor can support such a heavy load. To decouple the cabinets from it, each speaker’s plinth rests on six ceramic bearing feet.
Clarity & delicacy
I just cannot be without Alison Krauss and her A Hundred Miles or More when reviewing a top echelon audio component. For the tracks were recorded in different studios but with (mostly) the same musicians, they provide plenty of good testing material. At the same time, the album us super-useful to show if a speaker is well balanced or deviates from it – it is not easy at all to make all the tracks from the album equally great sounding. The Peak Consult Dragon Legacy speakers passed this test with flying colours. The sound had the right scale, and it was rock-stable with no spatial or tonal fluctuations. The stiffness of the cabinets kept resonances away from harming the sound, which was a remarkable achievement considering the large planes of the cabinets and structural openings (reflex ports) into them.
Similarly, Fink’s Trouble’s What You’re In was sent to the room with firm transient outlines of the guitars and great rhythmic drive. The Dragon Legacy could successfully provide the punch-in-the-stomach feeling, yet this punch comes in a boxer’s glove rather than fist. The volume and weight is okay, the definition is of the bass-reflex type, which is different from the closed cabinet one. To be fair, the latter concept lacks the volume and weight very often, so it is always a compromise.
Tonal accuracy
Tonal quality always primarily refers to vocals. You can immediately tell when something is wrong by listening to human voice. It may be too sibilant or dull, it may be muffled or bright too much, it may sound hollow, thin, nasal, shrill, or anything else in between. I'm not saying that good vocals automatically mean everything is good, but they are the fundament to start with. Recently, I've become fond of the song Můj bože, to je krásný den (My God, What a Beautiful Day) performed by Vojta Dyk and Lucie Šoralová. Not only is it a beautiful track, but it's also very well recorded. It did have some compression, but it avoided mastering. Michal Pekárek did a good job with the mix, and the result is something like an unmastered version of Café Blue by Patricia Barber. Considering how simple this music is in its arrangement, it's not entirely easy to make it play perfectly. However, from the very first verses, the Peak Consult Dragon Legacy surprised me with the sensational articulation of both voices (male and female), which were precisely carved to the last syllable, all against a transparent and quiet background; especially Lucie's singing, which is demanding on sibilants, was flawless. The piano accompaniment had the right sonority, the instrument had the right proportions of the hammers hitting the strings and soundboard resonance, there was absolutely nothing to complain about.
Spatial resolution
I listened to the Peak Consult Dragon Legacy from a distance of approximately 3.5 meters. This is about the minimum listening distance I recommend, mainly due to the tweeter’s height. Surrounded by two centre-tilted midrange modules in a d'Appolito configuration, the tweeter operates vertically in the acoustic centre of a large 60-centimeter waveguide. The tweeter itself has its own 10 cm waveguide on top of that. As a result, the treble radiation is very controlled, and the owner will have to play around with the ideal listening distance in combination with the toe-in and tilt of the speakers. The success of this fine-tuning will dictate how present the Peak Consult will be and how the soundstage will be perceived. Since the Peak Consult Dragon Legacy are expected to be placed in more generously sized spaces, much of the sound will be dispersed and reach the ears through reflections – this, in turn, will require at least basic acoustic adjustments if you don't want to lose some of what the Peak Consult does so perfectly.
This brings me to comparisons. Around this price point, the price means nothing and it is proportional to the manufacturer’s audacity only. Recently, I have reviewed the very good Estelon Extreme MkII Limited Edition speakers. The Dragon Legacy beats the Estelon in terms of musical enjoyment, the sheer joy of music, yet the Extreme provide much more on the fly adjustability to listener’s preferences and the music he wants to listen to. There you have YG Acoustics Sonja 3.3 that I haven’t reviewed (yet). The YG is an audiophile speaker, and I find the way it recreates music more accurate and truer to the source, more pristine. Yet, it does not mean that it necessarily trumps the Peak Consult in the ability to drop you in the crowd under a concert podium.
The Dragon Legacy are totally timeless speakers that not only make me feel comfortable when listening to them, but also make me perceive them as a reliable asset, similar to a hammer, matches, or an ordinary wooden chair – there are electric nail guns, piezogas lighters, and ergonomic designer chairs, but if you want good old analog reliability in all situations, nothing beats the classics.
Recommended resellers
RP Audio, Ostrava, +420 737 366 831
Manufacturer's website: https://peak-consult.dk
Associated components
- Sources: Audionet Planck player
- Amplifiers: Audionet Stern preamplifier, Audionet AMP power amplifiers, bi-amped (4 units)
- Interconnects and speaker cables: Gryphon Audio Vanta speaker, Audionet IC
- Power conditioning: Gryphon Audio Powerzone 3, Gryphon Audio Vanta
Gallery
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