Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

What if there was a character in Stanley Kubrick's classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey who was an audiophile? Aboard the Discovery One interplanetary space ship, what would his system look like? He'd probably have a pair of ultramodern speakers that could pluck sound out of the ether. He'd control the system with something like a present-day smartphone or tablet, commanding the HAL 9000 computer to play his favorite songs. The speakers would stand unobtrusively in a white room with 1970s modern-minimalist furniture, no rack of components to drive them, no wires connecting them, no shelves of physical media to play. And they would fill the room with music.

I am sitting earthbound in my living room almost a quarter-century beyond the year 2001, living a similar scenario with the Focal Diva Utopia streaming amplified wireless speaker system. My living room is not at all reminiscent of the Discovery One with its rotating central interior (footnote 1). But with the Diva Utopia system, I feel more in a sci-fi future young me might have imagined than with any hi-fi component I've reviewed so far. About the only thing the Diva Utopia has in common with the stereo systems I grew up with—and with my current reference system—is two floorstanding cabinets and diaphragms that move air to make sound.

Apparently the original soundtrack album to 2001, which was a Gold record in 1968, doesn't stream. About half the recordings collected for the soundtrack don't stream either. However, I did find, on Qobuz, the 1958 recording of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra by the Berlin Philharmonic with Karl Böhm conducting. That isn't the version used in the movie—that was Herbert von Karajan with the Vienna Phil—but it is the version used on the MGM Records album 2001: A Space Odyssey (Music from the Motion Picture Sound Track). I also found the 1966 recording of Johann Strauss's "Blue Danube" waltz by Karajan and the Berlin, and acceptable replacement versions of György Ligeti's Lux Aeterna and Atmosphères (footnote 2), which are also on the soundtrack.

Before we undertake the required deep dive into what makes this system tick, here's a quick listening report, time-warping ahead to the end of my two months living with the Diva Utopia, after the speakers were fully broken in. I closed my eyes and envisioned the 2001 scenes associated with each piece of music. Through the Diva Utopia system, the mighty opening of Zarathustra, the reverberance of "Blue Danube," and the all-encompassing creepiness of Lux came through full-scale, filling the room.

Into the gray felt towers
Standing in a room with only power cords connecting them to anything, the two speaker towers that comprise the Diva Utopia system look a bit like twin R2D2 robots from Star Wars but taller, with a presence somewhat like that of the black Monolith in 2001. They look, in other words, like high-end Focal speakers, with that distinctive, forward-tilting top.

Visible in front of each cabinet is an inverted-beryllium-dome tweeter and a 6.5" mid/bass driver. The side-firing woofers—two pairs, also 6.5", wide-throw with down-firing ports above heavy aluminum bases—are hidden behind black fabric panels amid heavy gray-felt "skins." The primary tower (which may be designated left or right, depending which side is more convenient for hooking up external equipment) contains all the auxiliary connections.

Each speaker tower contains its own communications interface (wireless + wired), DACs, and power amps, so you can play most streaming music, whether it streams from your favorite platform or your networked file server, with nothing physically connected but AC power. Sources with digital resolution up to 24/96 can stream wirelessly: The primary speaker receives the stream via Wi-Fi and communicates with the secondary speaker via UWB (UltraWideBand, footnote 3). With some cool technology, the wireless digital signal sent to the secondary speaker is kept precisely sync'd to the primary. For this review, I streamed music from Qobuz and my Synology network-attached server (NAS) running MinimServer UPnP over both Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet.

Inside these high-density polymer (dense, heavy plastic) cabinets is a whole lotta technology. The Diva Utopia was developed over 5 years by Focal—and Naim, Focal's electronics-focused stablemate. Indeed, the brains of the operation is the same NAIM PULSE streaming platform as in the Naim NCS 222 streaming preamp. The Diva Utopia system also uses the same Focal & Naim control app, which is available for smartphones and tablets running Apple's iOS or Google's Android.

Focal-Naim made a conscious decision to stay out of the Roon world. Focal Product Manager Rejean Bedel explained, "We chose not to integrate Roon Ready into the Diva Utopia due to concerns about the confidentiality of our proprietary technologies and trade secrets. Since Roon was acquired by Samsung Group (Harman), we see a potential risk that sensitive information about our products, their design, or performance could become indirectly accessible through third-party system integrations."

The Diva Utopia works with the Focal & Naim app and with JPlay, which integrates with the standard UPnP protocol. During my time with the system, I used both. The Focal & Naim app was updated several times during my auditions, as was the system firmware.

That exterior gray felt "skin" is worth a moment's attention. Bedel said that right now gray felt "is super trendy, really aligned with the luxury goods market." The two "skin" pieces are attached to the black speaker bodies with industrial-strength, Velcro-like (hook'n'loop) patches. In its presentations to dealers and the audiophile press, Focal has shown photos with other "skin" colors and patterns. More information is coming later in 2025, which I assume means that a Diva Utopia buyer will have more color and style options to fit their decor. The system's two pieces aren't small, so it's good to have some flexibility in blending them into a room's look.

Diving deeper inside the polymer bodies
The Diva Utopia system is all-digital. You can connect a turntable or another analog source via a pair of unbalanced (RCA) inputs on the back of the primary speaker. The analog signal entering the Utopia system is immediately digitized. Otherwise, the system's front door (which actually is located at the rear) is a group of input interfaces for Wi-Fi; wired Ethernet on RJ45; USB Type-A for a thumb drive or hard drive; HDMI eARC for connection from a TV; TosLink optical; and that aforementioned analog RCA pair. From there, the bits and bytes move to a virtual (digital) crossover network, room correction, and other digital sound processing (DSP), all performed on an Analog Devices ADSP-21563 SHARC+ audio processor engine (footnote 4). The crossover frequencies are 200Hz and 2300Hz, Bedel told me.

From there, the signal is routed to separate Burr Brown PCM1791A D/A converters (footnote 5) and analog preamps: one each for tweeter, mid/bass, and the four-speaker woofer arrays. The preamps feed separate class-AB power amps for the tweeter (75W), mid/bass (75W), and woofers (one amplifier for each pair of woofers, so 2×125W per speaker). In other words, each tower has 400W of built-in amplifier power. The power supplies for the amplifiers are linear, not switched. A DSP protection circuit monitors the temperatures of the amplifiers and calculates bass excursion based on the audio content. Bedel says it's impossible to blow up these speakers because the DSP will limit the output power as necessary so that they don't exceed the maximum spec. Don't worry if you like to listen loud: The limit is 116dB SPL, which can cause hearing damage and maybe also window damage, or furniture damage, or relationship damage.

In its marketing materials, Focal emphasizes the "UWB" wireless communication between the speakers. Bedel explained that UWB uses different radio frequencies from Wi-Fi, the protocol commonly used by wireless speakers to communicate and pass audio datastreams. That way the Diva Utopia system avoids the crowded Wi-Fi frequency bands in places like apartment buildings and urban neighborhoods.

However, I have to ding Focal for using UWB parts that limit maximum resolution to 24/96. Much of the music I wanted to hear, from Qobuz and my NAS, is 24/192, so I chose instead to connect a wire—the included CAT6e umbilical cord—between the speakers for most of my listening. The included cable is plenty long—it didn't restrict speaker placement—but it was one more wire on the floor.

When wired together, the Diva Utopia system can handle digital resolution up to 24/384 PCM and DSD up to DSD128 (technically DoP: DSD is converted to PCM). Higher-rate PCM is down-converted to 24/192 before conversion to analog.

While the electronics are Naim designs, Focal developed the bodies and drivers, using technology from the Utopia and Sopra lines of passive loudspeakers. The tweeter is an "M-profile" inverted beryllium dome. Included in the box of accessories is a booklet detailing how carcinogenic beryllium is and cautioning against touching the tweeter, breathing in any dust that might fall off if it's damaged, or trying to service or modify it on your own. Bedel said the inverted dome design provides wider sound dispersion.

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Footnote 1: See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_One.

Footnote 2: I did my best to re-create the soundtrack album as a Qobuz playlist: open.qobuz.com/ playlist/26912639; see here for details on its original contents: tinyurl.com/bdhuxs2e.

Footnote 3: See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband.

Footnote 4: See tinyurl.com/3anteekm.

Footnote 5: See tinyurl.com/3xz73tmm.