New blog post: Living with Focal Speakers

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.

@erik_squires curious if the newer Focal's have that same edge I've heard from the tweeters as the older models you had back in the day? At a friend's we have tried firing them straight out and then toeing them in 1/2 " at a time but still found the highs not to my liking. Personally I've always preferred soft dome tweeters but YMMV it's really such a subjective issue, we all hear things so differently.

Nice write up Erik. I only have an older pair from when they were called JM Labs, a pair of Tantal 509s and yes, the tweeter is very bright and sometimes fatiguing. They are in a 3rd system so no biggie.

my Focal experience is in the car, and those titanium inverted dome tweeters in the front pillars sing and ring!  About as good a reproduction as one can get of the live sound of a drummer riding a cymbal, might well be fatiguing in the home, but you need some extra signal in the car when giving consideration to the noise floor.  In my experience, soft domes go tink tink and decay too fast.  one of life's tradeoffs- ie. cannot expect silk or a polymer to sound like metal.  works for me as I listen to rock and electric blues in the car, more variety at home .

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

@audioman58

While I definitely found that better caps in the Focals were a significant improvement to the overall smoothness, not all speakers should be treated this way. The Focal Profiles, for instance, needed a complete woofer crossover re-think. Old Infinity speakers often had terribly poorly designed crossovers, and B&W speakers of old can also sometimes benefit from rethinking the entire design with modern approaches and tools.

@rsf507 Not all Focal speakers have that same edge, I think the later versions softened this a little, but I also tried felt around the tweeter. Used PSA backed felt and got a hobby ring cutter. Worked really well.

@frankmc195

You took focal speakers apart to examine them?

Actually originally I was just going to do some cap mods. Once I got the crossover out in my hands though my curiosity got the better of me so I ended up doing a complete speaker analysis using OmniMic, DATS and XSim. At some point I discovered a broken inductor lead, as well as curiously excessive resistors. This all led me to realize that part swapping was the wrong approach to them and they needed a new bass crossover. Eventually however I decided I would rather build my own speaker than continue that project.

@brianh902 

Worth measuring their output.  If it's reasonably good a cap swap may really help. Otherwise perhaps padding the tweeter would.  Old speakers are the perfect way to experiment.