Focal Utopia
Focal Utopia
One of the most well-known High-End Hifi headphones ever, and the successor to a model that had a big impact on the entire hifi landscape. Incredible haptics, a mix beween understatement and luxury, and sonically firmly in the ultra high end: Natural timbre, dynamic with a great punch already at low listening levels. Addictive.
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The best headphone in the world.
This is how the Utopia is called sometimes, and even if this kind of price invites a certain scepticism: Nobody really disputes that title. But why?
This is not an exotic headphone, in the sense that you don't need a specific type of amplifier to even use it, like electrostats do. It doesn't have a weird type of driver - it's an almost normal, dynamic driver type headphone. With 104dB efficiency and 80 Ohms impedance, you can drive this thing from an Apple dongle.
And yet: If you compare it to other headphones in its price range, you will find specialists that do one thing or two really well - but none of them deliver a package so well rounded that you really get enough of everything. It doesn't really have a weakness, and that sense of punch and slam that it delivers on top is something that few can match.
The Focal Utopia 2022 is a magnificent-sounding dynamic driver headphone, one that is truly worthy of being called a high-end flagship.
It looks beautiful, it sounds incredibly pleasing to my ear at least, and has the resolution and required levels of transparency to allow it to be super-easy to find the right setup to hear it at its best, for ‘your best’ should I say. You can run this from a DAP also and so long as the DAP has the chops, and some do, it will deliver an excellent performance.
If headphones matter to you and cost is not a stumbling point, just go buy the best. The Utopia deserve to be on that very short audition list of end-game headphones. They more than justify their TOTL status.
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Technical Specifications
- Frequency Response: 5Hz - 50 kHz
- Impedance: 80 Ohms
- Sensitivity: 104 dB/W/m
- Weight: 490 g
Measurements:
What does this mean?
The black line is something that could be called the „ideal“ curve of what a headphone should sound like. The Harman Research Group has a range of scientific studies around audio and the human perception of it - one of which was, how should a headphone sound like to be favored by a majority of people, no matter the age or other demographic variables? This result is called the Harman target.
From left to right we have the sub bass, bass, mids and then the curve finally tilts upward where the treble begins - this part of the frequency spectrum gets amplified naturally by the shape of the human ear.
Because it is an open-back, it has a slight downward tilt toward the subbass. A slight emphasis around 1.5kHz for some presence of vocals and main instruments, and then the curve follows slightly below the Harman target in the treble for non-fatiguing, long listening sessions.
Harman Research:
The Perception and Measurement of Headphone Sound Quality - What Do Listeners Prefer?