Focal Scala Utopia vs Wilson Sasha?

Sorry I was typing from my iPhone and the spell checker sometimes does really funny things. Naturalness is of course what I meant.

That was funny though!

Changster,

Thanks. I'll check them out...

I had to chime in on this thread as I have just wrapped up an eight day in-home demo of the Sasha against the Scalas.
I have to ask Dfw, what electronics were you playing the Scalas on?? I played them on all three sets of my electronics and they never sounded shrill. Unless you are playing on edgy electronics, the Scalas played with incredible balance and made evrything I played through them just turn into music. The Sashas had wholes in the sound reproduction and presented some harshness on a variety of media. Rock, bad recordings, and inflated bass track hated the Sashas where as te Focals stayed composed. The Berylium tweeter in the Focal is amazing and the legacy Focal tweeter in the Sashas were sharp to say the least.
Btw, my electronics ranged in combo from EMM, Pass, Levinson, Mcintosh, Burmester, Esoteric, and BAT.
Interested to hear back. Thanks

I agree with Pkancel, the Be tweeter is everything but shrill. It is incredibly airy, smooth and transparent, and probably one of the best in the world.

Yes Focals CAN sound shrill contrary to a lot of speakers which will impose their colorations on music and make everything sound more or less the same. But with proper matching (which is not difficult at all to achieve), they sound amazingly sweet and delicate. And if the music sound shrill (strings at full blast can do sometimes), then I want my speakers to be able to reproduce it.

I've noticed a lot of people are actually looking, consciously or unconsciously, for an interpretation of what live music sounds like, as opposed to the (sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes sublime) truth. And that's perfectly fine, it's all about enjoying the music after all.

But if neutrality and transparency (in other words, high fidelity) is what one is after, then the Utopia 3 series is the closest thing to live music I've heard. I have not heard everything out there but they are very, very special and fundamentaly different from what others do.

I won't comment on Wilson, which I haven't heard in a long time, except to say the beryllium tweeter is technically much more advanced than the titanium one.

I like the Focal sound but doesn't that kind of droop- looking leaning-over cabinet profile turns me off. That doesn't bother you?