Focal • Utopia and Elear Headphones

by Dennis Davis | April 4, 2018

© www.theaudiobeat.com

Once the preserve of small companies dedicated to the manufacture of headphones, the market for so-called "personal audio" has become so large that it has eventually attracted the attention of bigger players. Old-line headphone manufacturers like Sennheiser and Grado have been around for many decades, but it seemed like they became a little stale, and before you knew it the high-end market had been captured by relative newcomers like Audeze, HiFiMAN, Abyss and Ultrasone, all formed within about the past decade.

As these newer, smaller and more specialized manufacturers rolled out their designs, they also moved high-end headphones into a new sphere of cost and performance. Ten years ago, a couple thousand dollars could bring you headphone nirvana -- at the very top end of the price scale. Now, that’s the middle step. The consumer market for headphones has exploded over the last decade, and many of these new consumers treat their headphones as their main or only high-end speaker system. With that mindset, a $4000 pair of headphones and a matching amplifier seems an almost modest investment in hi-fi, and sales of these top models have been healthy.

The Focal brand has been around for almost 40 years, with a core business of manufacturing speaker drivers and complete speaker systems. For decades, Focal drivers have been incorporated into many of the top loudspeakers, and their own loudspeakers have long been some of the best-designed and best-performing on the market, not to mention their unique and attractive appearance. Focal's automotive speaker drivers are also among the very best available. (I have a car decked out with their drivers and they are quite remarkable.)

Several years ago, Focal entered the headphone market with a series of affordable products -- the Spirit One, Spirit Professional and Spirit Classic (which I reviewed in 2014). With that experience, Focal built its expertise in headphones to the point where it now has a dedicated headphone research-and-development facility, walled off within its main factory in Saint-Étienne, France. Focal has a five-minute tour of its facilities on YouTube, but when I was offered the chance to see them in person, I jumped at the opportunity. I visited the factory with Roy Gregory for the better part of a day, following the High End show in Munich in May of last year. One of the highlights of that tour was peering into the headphone R&D rooms, "clean" rooms that visitors may not enter and also spots in the factory where photography is forbidden.

In addition to the obvious economies of scale, the superior manufacturing facilities and the wealth of technical knowledge that Focal's history provides, this facility suggests that if something goes wrong with your headphones in a few years, Focal will still be around to fix the problem. Even in this disposable society, a pair of $1000 or $4000 headphones is likely to be a long-term investment, and it's nice to know that the manufacturer has your back. I was reminded of this by the recent abrupt announcement of the closure of Cavalli Audio, one of the premier manufacturers of headphone amplifiers. The owner of this mainly one-man shop was retiring and could not find a buyer for the business.

With its impressive resources, Focal has entered the now fairly robust market for high-end headphones. The popular price points for high-end headphones have evolved into a three-tier system, with models priced around $1000, $2000 and $5000. Focal introduced two models, the Elear priced at $999 and the Utopia priced at $3999, first to the US market in June of 2016, and a few months later rolled out these models in Europe and the rest of the world.

From a casual inspection, the Utopia and Elear look very much alike. Both are open-enclosure, over-the-ear designs. Both use a sliding click-stop expansion system with a yoke sliding into a black headband. The long and supple cables for both models look almost identical. The ear capsules are both similar-looking black cages. Look more closely, however, and it is obvious that significant differences lie in the details. Let’s start where the rubber meets the road, so to speak -- the ear cushions. The pads for the Utopia are lambskin leather combined with an inner layer of perforated fabric -- and more lambskin. The combination of fabrics is intended to tune the absorption of sound reaching your ears. The Elear makes due with microfiber covering memory foam. The yoke on the Utopia is carbon fiber, while that of the Elear is anodized aluminum. The Utopia terminates its cable with a self-locking LEMO connector, whereas the Elear substitutes a more pedestrian plug. Look closely and every detail of the Utopia, starting with the screws that hold the headphones together, suggests quality befitting a spaceship, rather than a more modest conveyance that need only assure you of reaching the local supermarket.

Do these differences justify such a significant difference in price? Absolutely, assuming that the price difference fits within your budget. In my experience, headphone design, more than that of any other audio product, gives truth to the old Marshall McLuhan phrase. There is such a symbiotic relationship between the fit and feel of headphones, and the way the music is perceived, that the medium is very much the message. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so; headphone listening is by its very nature a compromise. The message delivered by the Utopia is so much more than its admittedly steep price that you may forget you are listening to recorded rather than live music.

At the end of the day, if space and money were unlimited, why would you ever opt for headphones over the finest speaker system? Once you factor in the real world, the very best headphones allow entry to audio nirvana for those who have neither the space to set up a first-class listening room nor the funds to make it so. Enjoying the best headphone sound, however, requires what looks like a giant head clamp to be comfortable for prolonged listening, and that’s where the extreme attention to detail lavished on the Utopias pays off. With headphones, your head is essentially the listening room. No two heads are alike, and no matter how comfortable a set of headphones may be on someone else’s head, your mileage may vary -- the understatement of the year. Some listeners -- a small minority, no doubt -- cannot tolerate headphones of any kind. Headphones that to me feel like objects designed to inflict pain are perfectly comfortable to others. Beyond the fit of headphones, I cannot help but believe that the infinite variety of ear-canal shapes have some effect on the way two different listeners react to the identical set of 'phones.

One of the great beauties of headphone listening is that you don’t need to bring the headphones home to appreciate how they sound or fit your head. You cannot possibly hope to try all speakers, turntables, line stages or DACs at home, but you can transport your head to any number of places where virtually all high-end headphones are available. Whether at a dealership, a Head-Fi meet or an audio show, with a little work you can try almost any set of headphones available.

How comfortable are the Focals? A reviewer may assure you that a headphone will feel good on his head, and fortunately you can easily check whether his experience matches yours. I’ve long been (and still am) a fan of Audeze headphones, in part because their comfort allows long-term listening. But they now have considerable competition in the comfort zone with Focal headphones. I rank the Utopia as the most comfortable high-end headphone available. At four times the price of the Elear, the Utopia is clearly superior in the comfort department -- not four times as comfortable, but enough to let you know that the added expense is does not go for naught. I suspect the magic flows from the carbon-fiber yoke that hugs my head with just the right amount of pressure to hold the cups in place without creating the sense of a vice grip or a construction crane. Furthermore, the Focal headband is aesthetically pleasing compared to that of models from Audeze and HiFiMAN, which tend to look somewhat industrial in design. The Utopia seems to keep the earpads better spaced on my head without feeling like they are touching my ears. Compared to any of the top-of-the line Audeze headphones, for example, the comfort of the Utopia makes the Audeze earpads feel like I have pillows on my ears, and I don’t want pillows on my ears.

The Elear approaches this comfort level at a fraction of the price. That’s not to say you get the same plush feeling of the Utopia’s earpads, and the aluminum yoke does not have the light touch of the Utopia’s carbon-fiber equivalent, but in the $1000 market, the Elear is competitive with anything out there.

The Focal Utopia and Elear feel good and look like someone put considerable thought into their design, but do they sound as good as they look and feel, each at its respective price point? That’s a very important distinction, as I have yet to find a giant-killer among any of the recognized brands of headphones -- a $1000 pair of headphones so exceptional that it sounds superior to the competition’s $4000 model, in other words. The quality of headphones within various price points is clearly going up, but so far nobody’s lightweight contender has managed to compete with much more expensive models.

So the bad news is that the Utopia sounds significantly better than the Elear. Focal has not wasted money in developing its low-mass, M-shaped beryllium driver with an ultra-thin surround. Working with beryllium is very exacting, time-consuming and, if not done correctly, environmentally hazardous, and the Utopia driver requires a special (and very expensive) dedicated workstation to process the material. By contrast, the aluminum/magnesium driver in the Elear is much more cost-effective to manufacture and allows Focal to deliver high quality at a more modest price.

As far as bass extension goes, in my experience no headphones (no matter the price) come close to matching the deep bass provided by a good speaker system, and the Utopias are no exception. While a speaker can replicate the sound of a single instrument or a group in a room, headphones can at best create an alternate reality -- the sound of a musical performance in a space defined and limited by the air in and around your head. This artifice works pretty well until you plunge into deep-bass territory. I’ll duck for cover here, as there is a cult of headphone lovers who expect such earth-shaking bass that your head will spin. The lowest recorded bass is felt throughout your body, unlike higher frequencies. I don’t expect the earth to shake, and I don’t want my head to spin, but I do want accurate bass, and the Utopia delivers as well any headphone I've heard. The Elear is not far behind in terms of bass extension. My bass reference is the song "Angelica in Delirium" from the Trance Planet Vol. 2 CD [Triloka 7210-2]. With speakers, the bass waveforms are felt throughout your body, moving through your core. What surprised me most was not that the Utopias replicated this sensation as well as any headphones, but that the Elear was oh so close, falling short in terms of a slight loss of air and rhythmic drive in the bass region. I suspect that most cases where listeners found bass slightly deficient were the product of an imperfect match of Focal’s earcup shape to that person’s head.

As to the Utopia’s reproduction of the high frequencies, I found it to be exceptional. As with loudspeakers, headphones have given rise to a school of thought that harsh upper frequencies are a sign of accuracy. If you subscribe to the idea that etched, piercing sound is the epitome of accuracy, the Utopia will not appeal to you. The Utopia delivers the upper range (and harmonics) of cymbals, violin, piccolo and piano, but doesn’t drill them into your ear canals or deliver fatiguing harshness. That’s not the way I hear high frequencies in the concert hall or home, with harmonics stripped away to sharpen the edges. And the Utopia delivers accurate, balanced high-frequency sound without adding too much zip to the formula.

Just how good the Utopia performs up top is immediately apparent. For example, on "Crow Black Chicken" from Ry Cooder’s Boomer’s Story SACD [Mobile Fidelity UDSACD 2154], the Utopia highlights what such extravagance can buy. As with the best cables, electronics and speakers, the Utopia exposes the nuances of musical expression that are difficult to achieve with equipment most of us can afford. As with the results of cleaning up noise in the power supply, when listening with the Utopias, you recognize that Cooder’s guitar is not one-dimensional and that low-level detail is what makes instruments and voices sound real.

There was a time when many writers dismissed the importance of low-level detail, claiming it was merely unwanted detail (such as the scraping of chair legs on the Carnegie Hall stage) or was simply the result of a boost at certain frequencies to "sharpen" sounds. That argument is usually a deflection of the issue (granting that sometimes a component’s frequency response will affect detail). What the best equipment, like the Utopia, does is separate the strands of detail by creating a bigger space around the instruments, allowing for more texture and greater dynamic expression.

That these things help make music sound more real is obvious when listening to a large-scale orchestral piece such as Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 conducted by Ivan Fischer [Channel Classics CCS SSA 38817]. The Utopias, and the best headphones made by others, create a much larger soundstage that reaches outside your head, and imbues the orchestra with a three-dimensional feel. There is more air around the instruments. The difference between the Utopia and the Elear is quite significant in this respect; the difference between the Utopia and any other headphone below its price is equally large. And on my head, the Utopia achieves this state of affairs better than any other dynamic headphones I have listened with. It pushes the soundstage further out from my head, achieving better instrumental separation, which translates detail into musical nuance in a way few other headphones come close to equaling.

The Elear creates a sense of space and reproduces detail as well as well as any set of headphones I know of for a thousand dollars. In terms of bass punch and overall dynamics, they come closer than the huge price difference with the Utopia would suggest. The Elear doesn't come close to providing the transformative spatial quality and detail of its big brother, but it did a nice job on the Mahler Third -- the image of the orchestra didn’t stretch out as far from my head as with the Utopia, but it wasn't stuck in my head either. On Gram Parsons’ GP SACD [Mobile Fidelity UDSACD 2058], the Elear delivered dynamics almost on par with the Utopia, and it fleshed out the image of the stage, but seated me several rows closer than the Utopia. Some might even prefer this perspective -- one shared by most headphones costing twice as much as the Elear. For example, with small-scale but very dynamic music like Julius Hemphill’s Dogon A. D. [International Phonograph 0698], the Elear was a champ at reproducing the dynamics of the sometimes loud and bangy music, and it presented a very tight and accurate image of the players, outperforming the twice-as-expensive Audeze LCD-3. While I’ve not listened to every thousand-dollar headphone available, I have heard the majority, and the Elear sounds as good as -- and in most cases, better than -- anything else available.

At home, where I could spin vinyl, I compared both Focal 'phones to the Audeze LCD-2s ($945 when still available), and, at various shows and audio salons, to Audeze LCD-4s ($3995) and other brands' flagship models. As far as frequency extension goes, I went into the comparison with some trepidation, as I had heard conflicting reports from reliable sources that the Utopia was somewhat lacking bass, and from other sources that its treble extension left something to be desired (and from others still that it is the best they've ever heard!). From my listening sessions, I found the bass far from deficient and the treble as good or better than anything I’ve yet heard.

This is a tribute to both the fit and feel of the Focal headphones as well as the exceptional driver technology. They trick your mind into experiencing deep bass without thumping your head with it, and the way the high notes integrate into the quite extended space around your head gets closer to the experience of listening to high-end speakers than any other headphones I’ve tried. In particular, the carbon-fiber yoke and lambskin earpads of the Utopia seem to contribute to an extremely low noise floor (like installing an HRS rack under electronics), which allows the headphones to be comfortable and at the same time reveal in the best sense of the word.

It’s the upper-frequency reproduction that separates merely excellent headphones from world-class performers, and at four times the price of the Elear, the Utopia proves that returns are not diminished as the cost escalates. The Utopia’s performance in this area was significantly better than that of the Elear, but it was also significantly better than the performance of high-priced headphones from other manufacturers.

Focal stands alone in offering world-class headphones while at the same time selling speaker systems that stand with the best. If you can afford the very best headphones, the Utopia is in a very small handful that competes for your attention, and if the fit agrees with the shape of your head and the configuration of your ears, it makes the comparison all the easier. For those lucky few who can afford to spend $4000 for a set of headphones, the funds are well spent on the Utopia. On the other hand, if like most of us you haven’t won the lottery but want headphones that produce great dynamics along with excellent bass and upper-frequency extension at a much lower price, spend some time with the Elear.

Prices: Utopia, $3999; Elear, $999.
Warranty: Five years parts and labor.

Focal-JMlab
BP 374-108 due de L'Avenir
42353 La Talaudière cedex
France
(33) 0477 43 5700
www.focal.com

Associated Equipment

Analog: Spiral Groove SG1.2 turntable with Centroid tonearm, Lyra Atlas stereo and Titan i mono cartridges, Nordost Valhalla 2 tonearm cable, Audio Research Reference Phono 3 phono stage.

Preamp: Audio Research Reference 6.

Amplifier: Audio Research Reference 150 SE.

Headphone amp: Cavalli Audio Liquid Gold.

Digital: Neodio Origine CD player.

Speakers: Wilson Audio Yvette.

Cables: Nordost Valhalla 2 interconnects, speaker cables and power cords.

Power distribution: Nordost Quantum QB8 AC-distribution unit and Qx4 power purifier, Furutech GTX D-Rhodium power outlet.

Supports: HRS RXR rack, MSX Isolation Bases, Damping Plates, and Vortex footers; Stillpoints ESS Grid, Ultras and Ultra 5s; Neodio Origine B1 supports.

Accessories: Record Doctor cleaning fluid and brush, VPI "magic bricks," Audio Physic cartridge demagnetizer, Shunyata Research Dark Field Elevators, Acoustical Systems SMARTractor, Dr. Feickert Analogue’s Platterspeed app.

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