8 reviews
French-made high-end headphones & speakers
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Focal (Focal-JMLab) is a French high-fidelity audio manufacturer founded in 1979 by Jacques Mahul and based in Saint-Étienne, France, where it designs and builds its own drivers with an emphasis on full in-house production. Best known for high-end loudspeakers and car audio, it entered headphones in 2012 and makes them in France — including the open-back Elear, Clear and beryllium-driver Utopia and the closed-back Stellia and Bathys.
Focal's beryllium flagship, refreshed a shade warmer — imaging, dynamics and resolution nobody disputes, and a running argument over its bass, its smoothed treble, its stage, its fit and its ~$5,000 price.
The open-back everyone recommends — praised for its clarity, punch and finish, and argued over for a treble that reads as spot-on or metallic, its value at launch price, and a build that doesn't always last.
Twelve rigs agree on the graph, a hundred listeners argue about the headphone — the wireless Focal that sounds like a Focal and behaves like a first draft.
Half the reviews call its treble bright, half call it dark — and the measurements show why both are right.
One measured quirk — ear gain shifted a half-octave high — explains almost every argument reviewers have about it.
Focal took the Clear's famous treble peaks away and filled in its upper bass — which fixed the old complaint and started a brand-new argument.
The open-back that turned a Sennheiser upgrade path into a decade-long argument — and whose best trick and worst fault share one cause.
Focal’s most isolating closed-back — and a 12 kHz spike half the room never heard.
Prices in USD, recorded when each review was updated.