Focal Utopia Review (collective stream of consciousness)

I'd think the major difference bw Elear and Utopia is aluminium vs beryllium.

Time to showe a diamond mid-tweeter in there.

 

In this age of 3d scanning and cnc machining it shouldn't be too difficult. Borrow a R10, scan the housing. Find some nice wood and copy the design. Then maybe stick a HD800 or TH900 driver in there. Perhaps Audeze pads can be made to fit. Shouldn't be too hard if someone really wanted to.

It's debatable. Beryllium is a superior material compared aluminum, but it's also stupidly expensive. Then at the same time the Elear has regular magnets while the Utopia has neodymium magnets. So it's a double downgrade. I'd wager you could get awfully close to the Utopia without using beryllium if you just used the better neodymium magnets. And that would be the logical way to fill the 1000 to 4000 price gap.

 

On what basis? You can't just "not use beryllium." Every design/engineering choice -- and the resulting sound -- is interrelated. They were probably able to use the stronger magnet array in the Utopia because Be is a much more naturally rigid and damped material than the alloy in the Elear's driver, which would probably deform/distort too much under a larger magnetic force.

The price gap is large -- I'll give you that. But you are missing the overall picture. From a product perspective, the Elear fills the gap between the Listen and the Utopia. They seem to be doing a traditional good/better/best strategy. It just so happens that the "best" is priced a good bit further away than we'd all like.

 

I think you're overthinking it, everything is a compromise. Adding better magnets is not going to suddenly cause more distortion. It will however make the driver more sensitive to fine signals and able to pick up more details.

Carbon would be an interesting material as well. I bet you could make a small carbon platter driver which would serve the same function as the beryllium one, that is to say: Extremely light, non-magnetic, self-dampening. And carbon is actually cheap these days. At least compared to Beryllium.

 

When I first saw the Utopia I wondered how much the carbon fiber added to it's price and whether the cost/benefit ratio made any sense at all. I do recall reading something about carbon fiber being "less noisy".

In terms of materials I'd guess the key differences are as follows...
1) "Pittards" brand protein covered pads vs microfiber
2) BeCu vs Aluminium (pronounced with 5 syllables in my faux British accent ... AL - UM - IN - E - UM)
3) Carbon Fiber vs Aluminum (Plastic?)


Edited to add that I did some quick (very unscientific) research and found out that aluminum is less than $1/lb whereas BeCU is $600 to $800 / lb and carbon fiber is $10 to $12 per pound. LOL, unless the scrap/byproduct weight in producing headphones is MASSIVE I can't imagine the materials possibly accounting for more than $500 of the price difference between the elear and Utopia.

 

Having never heard the R10, hearing thw Utopia for a good chunk ot time, and owning the Code-X...
Im curious how good the R10 is relatively.

How would you guys rank them for tonality and technicalities?

 

Chipping in my 2p as I heard the Focals at some length at the NAS here in the UK yesterday. Big props to Focal for outstanding build quality, both Elear and Utopia are freaking gorgeous, and as others have said, actually feel worth their price (well, almost) from a materials point of view. I'm going to focus on the Utopia as that was my main interest at the show. Amps used were pretty much the entire Schiit lineup (focusing on Jodie), Trilogy 933 (wonderful amp, deserves more attention) and briefly the Chord Dave.

Show conditions caveat & all that, but the dynamism of the Utopia is breathtaking, making my foam ring modded HE1000 (which I brought along) sound lazy and docile in comparison. At one point I was listening to some Rolling Stones... I've never heard drum rim shots on a headphone with such impact and realism...stunning. The leading edge of sounds appear super fast & snappy, out of nowhere, whereas the HE1000 softens the edges. Listen to a horror movie and I suspect the Utopia would scare the shit out of you, the HE1000 is more of a PG certificate.

I'll echo previous thoughts with the one word descriptor... Balanced. Everything there, but not shoved in your face in a needy way. Placement is excellent, if not very wide... although I think this is to some extent recording dependent as I was caught off guard a couple of times with some sounds at the left & right edges further than I expected.

Clearly soundstage lovers are going to struggle with the Utopia though, and whilst it's hard to discern in show condition it doesn't appear to match the HE1000 from a simple bass extension standpoint. Anyway, I'm arranging for a quiet few hours with the Utopia to decide if I need to sell half my gear to buy one. Quite excited (tentatively), although I'm trying to not think about what else I could do with that kind of money.

 

Welcome to the world of moving coils.

 

Two full weeks into listening to the Utopia now.

My impressions have not really changed, at least in nature - perhaps they've shifted a little in terms of their magnitude. I'm probably a bit less "excited" about them as the newness has worn off but that's not to say that I'm enjoying them any less; they're getting the bulk of my listening time, split between a WA5-LE Mk2 and a Ragnarok (both sourced via Yggdrasil).

I cannot point to any specific change in character/sound of the Utopia over the last two weeks, though I'd had my dealer running them in for me for a few days before I was able to swing by and actually pick them up.

My initial reaction to the Utopia was that it would let me consolidate my TOTL headphone stable. In fact it put me in a state of mind where I actively wanted to do just that. I was thinking I would keep the Abyss and the Utopia in the main rig/house, sell the LCD-4 and HD800S then buy another Utopia and keep just that in the other house. And then evaluate how much head-time the Abyss got from there and make a sell/keep decision on that later.

As it turns out, my general preference for selling used items at used prices would put the LCD-4 at $2,400. While living with them certainly doesn't convince me they're worth $4,000 by any measure, I do like them enough to keep them for $2,400. Same basic story with the HD800S at $1,000. So my original plan has changed a bit ...

So, for now, I'll keep all four TOTL cans. I'll keep an eye out for someone local wanting to switch from a Utopia to an LCD-4 (which I would see being a direct-swap or a small cash delta), and in the meantime sell everything else except my SE846, ER4S and HD650*. Then just re-distribute the TOTL cans between my primary listening stations. If I do then wind up trading the LCD-4 for a second pair of the Focals, I would sell the HD800S at that time as well (until then I'll still want them for classical/big orchestral stuff as I'm not about to limit myself to planar cans for that sort of thing, nor am I going to keep moving headphones between houses - mostly I'll forget to do it anyway).

If I was starting with no headphones, but knew what I know now, I'd buy two pairs of the Utopia, stick one at each house, maybe pick up some Elear pads for fun, and call it good. Actually, I'd add an HD650 in that situation as well, just to have a common baseline/reference for other discussions*.

While the Utopia are, for me, the best, particular, all-around set of combined capabilities and compromises that fit my rig and listening preferences, I don't think they're particularly good value, nor are they that far ahead of much cheaper alternatives. Right now I feel an HD800S or properly modded HD800 is probably 95% of the way there, maybe more, and both are vastly better value. Put another way, the Utopia is VERY deep into the realm of diminishing returns.

Looking forward to hearing the HD800 modded by @johnjen next to these (they're the best HD800 I've heard so far)**.

Guess the next thing to do is a proper write-up of these things, along with my other TOTL cans (to provide additional reference points).

(*I have two sets of HD650 as it is, one bought near release and one picked up a few months ago when Amazon had them for $299).

(**For local types, we're going to try and setup a mini-meet to run the Abyss, LCD-4, Utopia, HD800S and John's HD800 against each other as soon as I get a clear spot in my schedule; if you want to join in that just let me know - via PM to keep the thread clean).

 

Thanks!

Im a coming. It was JohnJens Utopia that let me showed me how overpriced the Utopia is.

 

If Focal really wanted sales, Utopia should have been set appropriately at a competitive price of $2k tops.

I don't accept lame excuses of price as it is.
It is actually a slap in my face.
For $4K, I can and should be super critical of the product.

They can sell you a Elear no problem for $1K, then turn around, and swap the diaphragm and suddenly it's a $4K headphone?!?!!...
Wait, let's change plastic exterior and add some carbon fiber to make it look nicer, so we have some excuse for price...

Not everyone is that ignorant to believe there is any justification for the price.
They already had the design technology from their speakers.
No justification for some immense research, duh research don't cost nothing.
I can research myself all day on my free time.

Suddenly it costs so much to make a headphone.
BS
That's why we see so many new headphones every year.
Of course the trend is to accept ever inflated prices.
But I hope Focal change their greedy ways and stop selling a headphone for FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS, wich has a NON-TRANSFERABLE warranty..

Wait!..What!
Yeah.
I spend $4K on Utopia, and can't find a buyer because of non-transferable warranty!
Shit Now I gotta sell it $1k less..!

If Utopia does sounds better than my modded cans, then I will be even more upset!
Why?
because I would want a product from a company that I consider ridiculously greedy.

 

^ well to be clear, it is overpriced because compared to a headphone 1/3rd its price it performs only 5% better technically but 30% better tonally so in a perfect world it would cost only 1/3rd more and should be priced at 2400 usd (all given that 1700MSRP for the 800 is worth it in the first place)

However, its not a perfect world and as the best headphone out, they can charge 4000 and get away with it no problem. Why? simply from the fact that have created the best open back and no one can touch them right now. That alone gives it more value.

*If I create a product that is the best I have the right to charge more without taking a hit to my credibility because the price is a statement. It is a testament to the achievement. The best costs more and Maxx, the Utopia IS better than any headphones you have owned and have heard. Better tonality, realism, balance, dynamics, build, and clarity with technicalities to back it all up.

When you do hear it don't expect to be wowed. The thing with the Utopia is that a lot just sounds right and so since our minds are used to hearing things 'right" the wow factor wasn't there for me. The wow was in comparing to other headphones. "Comparison is the death of joy" so the Joy of other gear around it just vanquished when I auditioned the Utopia.

*What I would do though is, later on sell it for less to create a standard in the industry and embarrass other companies and monopolize that tier. But that is just me as a consumer because now the industry needs to step their freaking game up.

 

@Maxx134 @gbeast

Looking at it another way they could probably have put the Elear at 1.5k and the Utopia at 3k and made more money overall, just because how many more people would still be buying the Elear at that price. I'm betting the real world ratio between Elear and Utopia must be 10/1 or something like that. And then the Utopia would almost have seemed like good value at 3k. Pricing strategy is weird.

Right now there's just a giant hole between 1k and 4k, I'm betting it will be filled with an intermediate model.

 

I agree, I know that new headphones will be popping up to fill in the gap and make people go for it instead of the Focal. I am one of them. I just can't swing 4k and If I had the funds I wouldn't pay it because it goes against my conscience considering how me and my family function as a unit. I would not be doing my family right by paying full MSRP for that headphone.

 

Auditioned the Focal Utopia shortly at Can Jam today.

Seriously impressive headphones. The sound from those 40mm drivers is something else. The price, well that is what Focal decided on.

 

Do I think the utopia should cost less than 4K? Would 2-3k range be a better fit for it? Are inflated pricing trends annoying? Sure, yes absolutely yes. But all of the above conjectures and speculations are also BS. We are also all familiar with diminishing returns and exponential relationships between %improvements and price, this isn't new. We also have no idea about research costs, companies aren't amateur modders working on their free time to modify an existing product. Of course if buying a $2k+ or a $X+ Headphone isn't good for a family situation then obviously one shouldn't be blowing funds on this kind of thing. Lots of headphones wow your dick off in the short term but suck nuts in the long term and end up being sold off in a few months. Let's please keep this thread real, as conjecture and assumption free as possible. I very much dislike straw men and red herrings.

 

Nothing to see here, move along.

 

Well I don't quite get that because it's exactly what made me say "wow" when I heard it the first time. Excellent tonality coupled with dynamism, impact, and detail retrieval - I don't know of another headphone that offers all these attributes to this degree. @brencho makes a very valid point. It's one thing to discuss performance relative to product price in a review thread, but at this juncture it seems a new thread entitled "Focal Pricing Conjecture" is warranted for a lot of the above content.