Wes Phillips

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Testing: One, Two, Three
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
Jean-Paul Guy's office contains his electronics test bench and a variety of classic French hi-fi. He's definitely one of us.
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More From the Floor
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
It seems as though there's a QC employee for every assembly employee at Guy.HF. Not exactly, Jean-Paul Guy explained. Every G.HF employee is responsible for the work that comes to him or her—so after each employee signs off on a product as good to go, the next, um, guy inspects it before accepting it. "Mistakes get made," M. Guy told me, "but we try not to perpetuate them."
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Guy.HF Factory Tour
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
Guy.HF is located in Bourbon-Lancy, about two hours north of Focal's St. Etienne factory. The facility has produced Focal's cabinets since Jacques Mahul founded JMLab in 1980. The front of the cabinet-making facility is the original woodworking shop Guy's father Emile founded in 1945—the back end of the factory is newly built and state-of-the-art. Focal and Guy.HF were so intertwined that Focal bought a 49% interest in Guy.HF and the cabinet maker's entire output is now 100% Focal.
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Time for a Catblogging Palette Cleanser
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
It is Friday, after all. I met this suave French kitty in my hotel's rooftop garden in Lyon. Even French cats have a certain je ne sais qua.
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Anechoic Chamber
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
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.
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Utopia!
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
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.
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Top Secret
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  1 comments
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.
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Magnetic Personality
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
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.
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Then the Miracle Fabric
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
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.
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First the Foam
Wes Phillips
Wes Phillips  |  May 30, 2008  |  0 comments
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.
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