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Fewer loudspeaker companies have anechoic chambers than you realize. They take up an awful lot of space, for one thing. Focal has one, and it has a twist—rather than have a suspended floor, the company puts its speakers on a hydraulic jack and suspends it 30' above the floor. This makes getting massive speakers into and out of the chamber a lot easier and safer.
Of Focal's 200 employees, only 15 are "allowed" to build the Utopia line of loudspeakers. "Utopia, to Jacques Mahul's way of thinking, represents the finest expression of Focal—so only the most experienced employees can build Utopia products. They are also the most critical employees and we do not push them to produce mass numbers—we push them to produce perfect products," said Gérard Chrétien, Focal's managing director (and former editor of L'Audiophile.
Focal allowed me to visit the Be facility in which it manufactures its beryllium tweeters in a HazMat room. They would not, however, allow me to take photographs within it—saying that some of the machines were secret. So they gave me this factory authorized image of their technician examining a completed tweeter.
One of Focal's core technologies is its use of "multi-ferrites," Mahul having realized that it was more precise to use multiple magnets in big drivers than it was to rely upon finding enough truly huge, uniform magnets.
Another hand process is stretching and fitting various layers of adhesive-impregnated glass-fiber material to the front and back of the foam center. Again, depending on the driver's purpose, different amounts of glass fiber layers are employed. Since Focal controls the flare, drive system, and crossover, the company has massive amounts of control over elements like mass and Q.
When the proper number of layers have been "relaxed" and built up, the drivers are placed within gently heated molds and finished. Then they are precision-trimmed with a water jet cutter.
Stiff, extremely light "aircraft" foam is stretched over a mold by hand and gently heated to maintain "dimensional stability," according to Dominic Baker, Focal's export sales director. The molds have different flares, depending on the driver's purpose—and they are produced in-house by Opus 42.
Focal combines high-tech work stations with a phenomenal amount of hand labor. Metal drivers and inexpensive dome tweeters are heavily automated, but many drivers are assembled by hand, especially Focal's "W" composite cones.
I never cared much for Santana. (The band, not Johan. Johan, I love.) You know, there was always "Evil Ways" and "Oye Como Va"—fine songs for a stretch of highway when there's nothing else on the radio, but, eh: So what? I shrug my shoulders.
When I saw the album, though, within the dusty bins at Hoboken's Tunes record shop, I had to have it. The black and white cover art, with its cheesy-ass bubble lettering and that fearsome lion roaring out from a jungle of mad crosshatching was like something out of my father's high school yearbook, and I just couldn't resist. I…
Stephen Mejias, our excellent assistant editor, is fully in the grip of vinyl fever. He and I are now having daily conversations about the once and future allure of the long player.
He's going through vinyl fever for the first time and it's a ball to watch. This morning, we began talking about the "break-up" that most of us oldsters had to go through with our vinyl when CDs took over and the prospect now of going back and becoming re-addicted.
My Analogy: You had a long distance romantic relationship across the Atlantic that you had to break off. You had no choice. Then…
Having visited China and witnessed the building boom firsthand, I must admit that I suspected corners were being cut in construction—so I wasn't surprised by how many buildings came down. Considering all the construction accidents happening in NYC this year, who am I to look askance at China?
On Wednesday, Jeff Wong and I went on a shopping expedition to Brooklyn's Chinatown and while eating Banh Mi at a sandwich shop watched Chinese television coverage of the ongoing recovery efforts—very different from the US news snippets I'd seen.
Thanks to The Rage Diaries, I've now…