New blog post: Living with Focal Speakers

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.

@erik_squires I’m SOOO glad you have brought the DIY mindset to this forum! So many believe that the wrong things are responsible for how a speaker sounds like tweeter material, rather than the true contributing factor, the Xover. The tweeter material can have an affect, but it’s usually in how low the distortion is and how easily it is to integrate with the mid (Xover point). If Focal’s (of old) were perceived as being bright, it was because of the xover design and not the tweeter itself. If they measured as ‘bright’ it’s because that is what Focal was going for, it wasn’t unintentional. Please continue to educate the group on the measurement tools you employ and why they matter sooo much to tuning a speaker to what ‘you’ prefer (which might not be a totally flat response cure). 

This is a great read. I've always wondered how upgrading crossover components would align with Kanta / Sopra level Focals, not that many would be willing to try but can only imagine the benefits. 

@christianb5s4 You don’t have to destroy the speakers to experiment with a different Xover. Testing with an outboard xover board is pretty simple. Examining the stock boards also gives you an idea where the manufacturer cut corners (in components) and where you might be able to find some improvements.