FOCAL UTOPIA/ELEAR headphones
The Utopia is one of the world’s most expensive headphones, though Focal thoughtfully made a more affordable option too.
The Utopia is one of the world’s most expensive headphones... though Focal thoughtfully made a more affordable option too.
Focal’s Grande Utopia loudspeakers weigh 260kg each and sell for upwards of quarter of a million dollars, so it’s very thoughtful of the company to bring their philosophy of acoustic sound purity to something rather smaller and cheaper. Though perhaps ‘cheaper’ is the wrong word for a pair of headphones that still set a new level in pricing, at $5499 a pair.
But then they do offer something genuinely unique, with Focal saying it approached the design as a pair of compact, ultra-nearfield speakers as much as headphones.
They manage to look stunning, of course, from the carbon-fibre yokes to their lamb-leather headband, the shape of which is described as “a constant bend” which aims to spread their 490g weight evenly and comfortably over any shape or size of head. Those outer mesh grilles indicate the open-backed design — these are very much home headphones, spilling sound out to the room as well as entertaining the wearer, assisting the sound quality by removing any physical compression of the dome as it moves, while also maintaining the listener’s connection to the room outside, which Focal deems important achieving a relaxed appreciation of music without the usual isolation within a headphone world.
That openness to the room is indeed remarkable — we don’t remember donning a pair of headphones so entirely transparent, as if they are a cloak of invisibility in audio terms. In the silences and even during the music, the room is still there — people talk, the phone rings, the dog barks — you won’t miss a thing, even while they feed your their beautiful music. Nor will anyone around you avoid your music programme, of course, with their cones playing out to the room as well as into your personal space.
Tantalisingly toxic
And those cones are the Utopias’ trump card, with beryllium used for their drivers, a material so toxic during working that only a handful of companies globally can refine and shape it. Focal works with one of those to get the tweeters for its hi-fi and automotive speakers, and for the Utopias they have delivered a 40mm pure beryllium headphone diaphragm. Note this is not a mere coating of beryllium — you can pick up a pair of beryllium-“coated” earbuds in Jaycar for $30. The Utopia diaphragms are pure beryllium, and so they take true advantage of the element’s properties as
a diaphragm material — lightness and strength together together with a high damping factor. A beryllium driver is seven times more rigid than one made of titanium (it is the only metal rigid enough to scratch glass) — so it can move fast yet deliver without distortion.
Equally importantly its shape has been re-engineered into what Focal calls an ‘M’ dome. Focal says it took two years of R&D to develop the machine able to press a flat sheet of pure beryllium into this dome shape, pioneered in the company’s K2 car audio tweeters, and found to have multiple benefits. It creates a bigger emissive area, so the 40mm ‘M’ dome here delivers the equivalent SPL of a much larger traditional cone, but with a higher break-up point as well, so that the Utopia transducer claims a frequency response ranging from 5Hz to above 50kHz. The ‘M’-design motion is also able to deliver more of a plane wave, time-aligned as it reaches the ears rather than the time-separated elements emerging from a steeper cone wall. There’s less dispersion time in a headphone than an open room or car environment, of course, but given the spaciousness of the Utopias, it’s still an effect worth tackling.
The lightness continues with the widediameter but ultralight formerless voice coil, and the diaphraghm surround, which claims “the thinnest suspension ever created” at 80 microns, yet still allowing long and linear excursion.
These are, of course, very much the home headphone. The plug is a full-sized quarter-inch Neutrik stereo jack, on a fully symmetrical shielded cable with nicely self-locking bayonet Lemo connectors to the headshells. The earcushions are 20mm thick, combining lambskin leather with microfibre fabric that has micro-punched holes through it, said to fine tune the absorption ratio and thereby improve (flattening) the frequency response.
Weaving reality
What all this delivers is impeccable imaging within an entirely natural sound — perfectly balanced tonally regardless of the volume. But first comes that surprise of exactly how open these headphones really are. Not only is there no sense of enclosure, there is no loss of your surroundings. We were running in the Focal Elears in the next room, and their tiss-tiss spill was barely tempered at all after we donned the Utopias. There is a mild curtailment of upper frequencies from the outside world, but still a sense of your space. Not only is this handy for hearing the phone or the dog going off at a bush turkey on the fence, etc., who knows what psychological relaxation is gained by the listener through staying in contact with your surroundings. If a cave panther approaches from behind, you’ll still hear it. That’s important stuff to the reptilian brain.
Above this background you may be distracted, of course, by the wondrous realities woven by the Utopias.
During their own run-in we used them for late-night TV listening on shows as diverse as the movie BFG and the series Twin Peaks. Although driven at this point by relatively modest Cyrus headphone amplification (The ‘One’ reviewed elsewhere in thie issue), how brilliantly etched was every rustle of curtain, how real and right the dialogue, how clearly panned the passing cars — the Utopias were a window into the sound design (which Lynch handled personally on
Twin Peaks). All the technical prowess of the headphones was quickly forgotten as we became immersed in the action.
And with music most of all. From soaring soundtrack strings to the latest closing act in The Bang Bang Bar, the Utopias were delicious and faultless, other than in exposing others’ faults.
Moving up to music from a higher quality headphone amp, well, we just loved our time with these headphones. They can at first feel surprisingly light in the bass, but they’re not — it’s just honest to goodness bass which starts right from the bottom and stays flat to the limits of hearing and beyond, and their delicacy of touch clears the way to a complete presentation of a performance, or of a studio mix. They allowed clear separation of the rising choir lines behind the second half of young Harry Styles’ Sign of the
Times; they projected an immaculately portrayed Diana Krall on Alone Again Naturally with not a smidgeon of spit on that velvet vocal, it sounded utterly natural — this is the quality of production delivered with perfection by the Utopias.
Stepping down
So, time to switch to the Elear. It seems rather callous to be defining a $1599 pair of headphones by the elements that have been downgraded from the Utopias, rather than by considering their own merits, but inevitably we must compare them with the range-toppers, especially as Focal says the Elear design was created by taking the lessons learned from developing the Utopias and applying them to a more cost-effective set of materials. And this is just as happens in Focal’s hi-fi speaker range — so that you might consider the Elear as the headphone equivalent of Focal’s Aria series, say.
So here there is again an ‘M’-shaped dome, but here made of aluminium/magnesium instead of beryllium. The yoke is aluminium rather than carbon fibre, the ear-cushions are of man-made micro-fibre rather than dual-fabric with real lambs leather.
But the technical construction is otherwise very similar, and many of the specs too. Sensitivity is 104dB (1mW@1kHz), same as for the Utopias. The quoted THD is “less than
0.3% at 1kHz, compared with the Utopia’s 0.2%. They are specified down to the same 5Hz, but rise only to 23kHz compared with the Utopia’s 50kHz, so your pet bats and dog may be disappointed at your compromised choice. In comfort terms they are actually 40 grams lighter, though we can’t say either model was ever remotely uncomfortable. [We must digress for a moment to mention that we took this information from Focal’s “specifiction” sheet, a wonderful typo we might apply to information from quite a few hi-fi manufacturers. Of course we’re sure Focal’s figures would be specifact rather than specifiction.]
And the sound
We thought it was fair to take a week between writing up the Utopias and getting our ears under the Elears, precisely so they could stand on their own merits, though we later did some direct A-B comparisons. Our first experience was by chance, popping them on while they soaked to hear some odd noises which turned out to be early Electric Light Orchestra, with some superbly rich and resonant cello parts. This was followed by Vivaldi Springing into action under Von Karajan with Anne-Sophie Mutter — the openness of the Elears lifted the ceiling on this recording with so clear a portrayal of the acoustic that we found ourselves pondering the height of the ceiling — perhaps some kind of dome? Alas, the sleeve notes tell us not. But what elan the young Mutter brings to the piece, and what an extended canvas the Focals allow the combination of grisled conductor and nubile soloist. (This was the first classical recording to go platinum on CD, and a new 180g vinyl pressing is quite the tempation.)
This marvellous sense of atmosphere brought similar advantages to some wellbalanced multiple-microphone Sufi festival recordings, Mehr and Sher Ali’s Jane Wale reaching up beyond the headspace, yea, even unto the very heavens.
One of our regular testers, kd lang’s The Air That I Breathe, was a delight on the detail, the Elears revealing not only every tap of brush on snare but the intensity of every tap, almost the physical presence of the drummer. The complex climactic vocal harmonies did provoke a little congestion, and if there’s a finger that can be pointed at the Elears, it’s as to whether they can fully ride the storm of such complex layers delivered at moments of crescendo. The busier the mix, the more that direct comparisons with the Utopias showed the latter’s prowess. Radiohead’s Paranoid Android on the Utopias sounded superficially lighter and less driven, but was in fact effortless and uncompressed, whereas the Elears seemed to cup the midrange clarity and give the bass and drums on the heavier section a feeling of reduced dynamics, of thumpiness rather than precision. The complete naturalness of Alone
Again Actually through the Utopias was also lessened through the Elears, the sibilants especially affected, softened in details, sometimes yielding more effs than esses.
High quality amplification did even the playing field. Belle & Sebastian’s I’m A Cuckoo had sounded simultaneously fizzy on the synths and a little soft on the vocal from the Cyrus headphone socket, but this disappeared entirely when we upgraded the Elears to a dedicated Lehmannaudio headphone amplifier. Though of course, the Utopias took a similar step forward to stay ahead. Each new track we played first on the Elears was highly enjoyable, but switch A-B-A and second time was revealed as thicker, more insistent at volume. The Utopias were never insistent, indeed their low distortion means you should take care with the level.
Conclusion
If you have $5.5k in a big jar marked ‘Headphone Fund’, well, your choice is easy. The poor Elears get a hard deal arriving alongside the Utopias, and while excellent in themselves, they do have more competitors at the price also worthy of consideration and comparison.