New blog post: Living with Focal Speakers

@erik_squires

I suppose that depends on the specific tweeter in question. But the modern ones I was referring to, as used in the Aria line, are actually a regression from the old JM Labs designs.

When a manufacturer offers six performance tiers of speaker, they can put only so good of drivers in the middle range products without impeding sales of their flagship designs. It’s a marketing strategy that works for Focal but ultimately results in a rather poor value for the end customer.

 

In most speakers theXover is the main weakness in lack of quality

rebuilding it with much higher Xover parts is= to adding 50% more on your speakers in refinement imaging as well as soundstage depth

speakers are built to a price point ,even in Wilson’s, martens, Harbeths and many others. I have been involved with capacitor and resistor upgrades

look at humble homemade hifi capacitor reviews you can see a bit about the grading 15 being the most most are using Solen, or Mundorf cheaper Evo line

even in $20k+ loudspeakers , sad but true. The Dynaudio I rebuilt transformed them $well over $1k in parts but thespeaker is 20% better sounding which is huge

and = to the next more $$ expensive model $50% more monies.

It’s easy to understand why some would come to this conclusion given the crossover BOM we find in most speakers under $10K/pair.

IME, however, it’s not actually the bottleneck of most speakers, even if the given speaker uses really cheap Xover parts, such as Dayton or Bennic. Nine times out of ten, a speaker’s primary weakness is in fact the quality of the drivers or the crossover points/slope—either the drivers are poorly behaved because they’re of low quality or the crossover doesn’t sufficiently filter out the break up resonances. Often times, it’s both.

This is one reason I’m not a fan of Focal speakers, because many of their drivers are not that good despite what the marketing would have us believe. Take their inverted Al/Mg domes for example. When they are measured in free air they exhibit nasty break-up modes, and a narrow usable bandwidth. If anything, they actually need a low-pass crossover because they’re so poorly behaved in the upper most octave. The SB Acoustics tweeter used in Revels similarly priced Performa3 range is far superior, and it’s only a $55 unit on the OEM market. So in essence, with the Focal Arias, you get tweeters that can’t remotely compete with those which cost a DIY builder $110/pair.

All this isn’t to single out Focal though, these sort of quality discrepancies are very common in retail audio. Most such brands use inexpensive drivers, but what sets the better ones apart (especially in the <$10K category), is which inexpensive drivers are chosen and how they’re implemented. That aspect is way more critical than the choice of crossover brands/cost. Even cheap Xover parts contribute hardly any measurable distortion (if implemented appropriately) relative to the speaker’s drivers. That is the reason for which we see $6K/pair speakers that might have $800 worth of drivers but as little as $20 total in crossover parts. It’s because these manufacturers have performed the measurements and listening tests required to determine what actually matters, and of course, the large builders are going to cut costs anywhere they can.

But it’s amusing to me when I see guys obsess over crossover part quality when their speakers employ drivers under the $100/each range (the vast majority). Rather than spend $200 additional dollars on better caps/resistors, that person is better off saving that $200 toward better speakers built by competent designers.