Focal Elear and Utopia

I used to not believe in burn in, but it really made a huge difference with the Ether C. I listened to it for about 10 minutes when I got mine, then I put it into the garage and burned it in for 4 days, then listened again. It really was a significant difference. It's quite possible the Focal headphones will sound better with some burn in. Obviously some products will need it and some do not.

As for the the AV Source Guy, he is a sales man, but he is pretty polite. I've dealt with WAY worse sales that that guy. I've never been there, but it sounds like the AV Source has a ton of really nice equipment to test. Seems like a nice store.

 

Going out on a limb here, but I would say if you have distortion and don't want it, filtering it out would be good

 

doesn't matter if he's a nice/polite guy or not, he's repeatedly stated that the Focal is the best ever, and has repeatedly made comments that deflected reviews/impressions that were not 100% positive. I don't understand how he can pretend that he's not biased, after he just set up an event at his store featuring the Focals, Cavalli, and Woo products.
Any rep from these 3 companies along with the store that hosted the event and has a strong incentive to push and sell these products, should not be commenting and especially not heaping endless praises on these products. If this isn't a clear cut conflict of interest case, then I don't know what one would be. The smart thing for him to do is to just shut up and let the attendees and the compensated reviewers do the talking. Kind of funny that there's 1 guy that's pointing this out and is now being attacked as detracting from the thread.

It's really ridiculous that as an enthusiast forum, the moderators hasn't put a stop to it or at least pretend to tone it down.

 

Fair 'nuf. the thread should have been in the Sponsor's forum as Cavalli and Woo also participated in the thread. Stillhart also chimed in a lot. Just curious on how he is thought of around here?

So, I was curious, and the alternative being work, so I looked at the thread again on HF. I have since unsubscribed from it, but I was curious.

TSAVJason doesn't chime in until post 211. 610 posts in the thread at this point. Near the end, some folks take him to task for his postings.

I broke TSAVJason's posts into these categories:

Logistical (benign): 10
Advice oriented, but general wisdom (benign): 5 - like "you should always listen before you buy expensive headphones"
AV Source Sales oriented: 6 - trying to get people into the store
Focal praising: 17
Other, generally benign (responses to simple questions and quick comments): 15

That 53/610 (8.7%) of a fairly large thread!

In his defense, I think he was just trying to be helpful, but that doesn't make it any less annoying.

I'm actually attending an event at ListenUp in Albuquerque on Wednesday (my b-day , but unfortunately they will not have the new headphones. They will have the new B&W speakers, so I'm looking forward to that. It's sad, but a small ListenUp is all we have in the whole state for an audio store ('cept BestBuy)

 

Ok you have to fill me in here or send me a link about this legendary headfier

 

Just saw the impedance graphs (I know I'm a bit late, only checked HF thread because of sorrodje )
As expected, resonance frequency is quite a bit lower than most open back dynamic headphones (seems centered around 44-47Hz) and has a higher Q and (most importantly) peaks much higher at 5 times the impedance for the Utopia and 4 times the impedance for the Elear.
The voice coil inductance looks very low, but the scale might be fooling me. What concerns is the small bump at 4kHz on the Utopia. The Elear seems to lack this.

 

Cliff notes version: dislikes anything that has to do with @Marvey, and thinks anything Schiit puts out as "meh".

 

He talked good about Gungnir Multibit though didn't he? But the same thing could be said about people in here. Everything made by Audio-gd is "meh".

 

Everything made by everybody is between meh and crap

 

He preferred his audio gd dac to the Gungnir Multibit. I have no comment on audio gd products since I haven't heard any.

 

He did, but he also said that the two were more similar than different and that he chose audio gd because of tonal preference. It's been a long time since I read it but if I remember correctly he didn't say it was bad by any means.

 

I also took note of the impedance graph. I was very skeptical of this flaky surround holding everything in place and many aspects actually point toward a good old spider conveniently hidden behind the w cone and the voice coil / magnet assy ;-).

Posted here: http://www.head-fi.org/t/811270/foc...h-impressions-head-fi-tv/600_30#post_12665843

Now, given the blabbing about how light the moving mass is, I can imagine it was convenient to omiss talking about this spider.

Also, not sure if you've seen the pics posted today but we can clearly see the back of the cone. The slight bump at center of cone is visible on opposite side. Does not look like it's thicker there. Related to manufacturing process? I don't know much there but I recall reading they make flat sheets first and then stamp.

Cheers,
Arnaud

 

Maybe I don't quite get this, but I thought Fs increases as the suspension gets stiffer and the moving mass gets lighter.

Fs is very low and moving mass is most likely also very low, so suspension must be very compilant. I don't think there's a spider there. Also looks like that in the videos where he blows on the driver and it moves a lot.

I thought that was the point of the super thin surround. More compilant suspension to lower Fs while keeping moving mass very low.

From what I've seen I really like these headphones from a technical standpoint. I'm actually wondering why it doesn't sound better than what people seem to be reporting. Maybe because Focal.

Yes, also noticed that.

 

Considering that it's made from beryllium I don't think the price is totally out of line. Focal has Be tweeters for $800 each so I wouldn't be surprised if the drivers are $1000 each at least. Similarly I don't think the price for the HE-1000 and the LCD-4 are totally out of line as well since nanometer thick membranes aren't the easiest to work worth. Just like how I would understand a pair of headphones costing $15000 if they were made with diamond membranes. Much more comfortable with the Utopia over the Final Audio Sonorous X where I have no clue why it's so expensive. Whether the sound alone is worth $4000 is another question, but just based on engineering and build I think it's worth comparing to electrostatics at this price.

Like mentioned elsewhere I think the Elear is the big winner in this. It will probably have 90% of the sound at a quarter of the price. So why even bother to make the Utopia instead of just focusing on the Elear? Part of it is that there are people that will buy expensive gear, but I think a bigger part is that people at companies like Focal or Sennheiser want to try to make something that they think is the very best they can possibly make regardless of cost.

 

40Hz is not low at all in my books. The surround has very high compliance, you should get a resonance in the few Hz range with it. Also, I imagine the distortion would go through the roof if all that held the cone in place was this fabric surround (see the weird shape it takes when driver goes back and forth through xmax).

Now, I am like you about the driver design, but I am not surprised the assembled phone does not sound as miraculous as the claims. IMO, headphone design is so much more challenging than loudspeaker because you're in the very near field of the driver (it all get very complicated there) + local resonances occur in most sensitive portion of our hearing so quite a challenge to the designer + as we all know there is actually not a single target curve to shoot for so it eventually boils down to voicing that attracts the most...

I am sure we can make a case to justify why the Utopia costs 4kUSD, thinking about the original driver design / R&D / made in France etc. But, if it barely exceeds performance of an HD800S, it does not really matter. As such, the Elear seems a better value proposition, yet again some recommend to keep the HD6X0 in mind when evaluating it. In both cases, we're talking about 3x price difference. All that for "French Touch", sounds a bit expensive to me.

 

Any more news on the Listen? Will it give the Oppo PM3 and Audeze Sine a run for their money in terms of portabilitiness?

 

Not sure who you are referring to, but the new Focals' thread is simply embarrassing to me.
I'm "Me x3" on Head-Fi and pointed out part of TSAVJason's behaviour there on page 40, because I think he went way too far explicitly promoting the products he sell and discrediting those impressions that were against the hype he's apparently trying to sustain.

As you said, I was accused of derailing the thread. A thread with more than 40 pages and just a few impressions so far.
Others were in a similar position.

I guess that's Head-Fi's darkish side.
That's why I spend most of my time there helping newcomers on the Help and Recommendations sub-forum and don't dig much into other sub-forums.