Focal Elear and Utopia

Size notwithstanding, that is an EXTREMELY well designed driver.

Personally, I would be a bit worried about the dome shape creating a frontwave that interacts with the ear canal too strongly. The bump at 1.5kHz and subsequent dip at 4kHz (the ear canal resonance range) do not necessarily make me any more comfortable in this regard.

That being said, the driver appears to be spaced far enough from the ear for this to not be an issue -- these have the potential to sound extremely good if the enclosure's right. $4k good...? Really hard to say at this point.

The lower price makes the Elear far more interesting to me, personally.

 

http://www.head-fi.org/image/id/8873761/width/900/height/900/flags/LL
I thought they only had the steel mesh on the outer side but in the picture they look alot more "closed" with the finer plastic mesh resistor on the inside, similar to the 812.

Also the Utopia driver seems to have a smaller horn shaped port on the back which is probably why Fs has higher Q.

Fully agree.

 

Oh, good catch on the inner grill! Looks awfully similar to HD800(S) mesh.
In such case, I suppose the compliance control may just come from the leaky earcup / earpad design (relatively easy to tune the Q factor at Fs this way), just like for many existing headphones drivers.
That'd be pretty easy to check by comparing electrical impedance in free air vs. acoustically loaded. As mentioned earlier, without a stiff spider, the Fs must be rather very low.

I don't believe the shape of this vent plays much role at such low frequency as 40Hz... Definitely can change things from upper mids up but not at such low frequency.
We see this for vents but that's when there's pretty serious airflow going through the port (airflow induced port noise), I can't imagine the drivers moving THAT much in standard usage .

arnaud

 

Interested in hearing the Focals. I think the vendor promoting/selling them on the thread is delusional though.

 

He is slightly biased... Slightly

 

I don't follow where you are going with this? This Fs of loaded headphone at 40-50Hz is pretty typical for many phones (regardless of them being dynamic, planar or estat type). Physiology is what it is and, indeed, headphone can't ever replace chest pump you get from real life sub-bass but you can buy yourself a headphone / shaker type in this instance (I recall reading a company released such kind of product recently) .

arnaud

 

Is it? In the Innerfidelity impedance charts pretty much every open back dynamic has Fs of around 100Hz. Planars may have a loaded resonance frequency of around 50Hz but open back dynamics are a better comparision in this regard.

Also, do you think that the thin surround really is compliant enough to lower the unloaded driver Fs down to a few Hz? The driver is probably very light.
Using half assed maths you would need a compliance of 0.3 m/N at an assumed 1g moving mass to lower Fs in the single digit Hz range. Is that realistic (honest question; I really have no clue. I know most speaker drivers are in the mm/N range.)?

 

Humm, indeed I haven't done very thorough check and, now that you mention this, I recall most grados being tuned well above 50Hz ...

Really I couldn't estimate such number from the looks but thin / impermeably fabric like what seems to be used must have really high compliance (low stiffness). Also, not sure what a reasonable estimate of moving mass is but 1g including the voice coil + whatever sealer/adhesive they're using to make it hold without former sound optimistic no? Granted, it's been over 15 years since I looked at Thiel & Small parameters closely and always was for 5in + drivers so I certainly could be wrong...

 

I don't think 1g is optimistic for the Utopia driver with all this talk about lowering moving mass, no voice coil former, etc... .
At worst it might be a little higher (say double or triple) and at best maybe even lower (0.5g? even less?), or maybe I'm completely off the mark.
This 30mm Accuton diamond tweeter (http://accuton.com/drivers/detail.php?driver=25) has a moving mass of only 0.43g. Now, I don't know how thick the Utopia Be dome is but Be is lighter than diamond. I believe the ceramic Accuton tweeters have a diaphragm thickness of 50 microns so I guess the diamond ones are similar.
Actually the C30-6-358 (which has no anti-resonant cutouts) has a lower moving mass (0.28g) than the diamond one. I guess this explains the higher sensitivity. The one with the anti-resonant cutouts has a moving mass of 0.4g.
Now, I don't know if these speaker drivers are a good comparision but I think they can give us a rough idea.

Essentially what I'm saying is that no spider is needed for 46Hz resonant frequency because these drivers most likely have a very low moving mass. 46Hz actually is much lower than comparable headphones.

 

After $1000 all improvements are incremental improvements. Squeezing that last 1% will cost you far more then the first 1%. It's just like scotch, a 25 year bottle will cost far more then an 18 year bottle but might only taste 5% better.

 

The A/V sales guy mentions these are flying off his shelves, getting bought by mostly people outside of head-fi. Can that be for real? At 4k a pop for the Utopia? Definitely a kind clientele around LA then ! .

 

Focal does have a bit of a cult following so it's not surprising that old rich audiophile farts might be buying these up to listen to while their trophy wives get their beauty sleep.

 

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbrea...06385-vv-5671949f-f744-4b52-8bb9-d4159c21d1df

 

Agreed. Even though I didn't like these headphones all that much, my gut tells me they might improve with burn in. The "polite" sound reminded me of some speakers I once had that broke in real well later on. I'd certainly give them another try once burned in

He's very opinionated, and I scratch my head at some of the brands he carries in his store. That being said, I did appreciate that he made it a priority to keep the auditioning area as quiet as possible so you could get an honest listen. He's definitely dedicated to "philia' of audio.

His shop is quite nice and he carries a lot of high end gear. He's coming to headphones as a high end speaker system dealer first, introducing the well heeled audiophile to high quality personal audio. He's selective and I think he probably sees himself as a curator of high quality audio equipment, so it's not surprising that he genuinely stands behind his merchandise and that he's able to move these cans.

 

The very fact we're talking about him and not the Focals kinda validates his approach. As he's reminded everyone multiple times, he carries other brands as well.

 

Google told the drivers from SE master 1 are ceramic+metal...

 

Anyone know where I can get those laser cut headphone stands featured in the video?

 

http://www.bendyhead.com/

 

Welcome back @money4me247 ! It has been a while but good to see you posting again.