New blog post: Living with Focal Speakers

You took focal speakers apart to examine them? Sounds like some of the brilliant ideas I get sometimes.

In most speakers theXover is the main weakness in lack of quality 

rebuilding it with much higher Xover parts is= to adding 50% more on your speakers in refinement imaging as well as soundstage depth 

speakers are built to a price point ,even in Wilson’s, martens, Harbeths and many others. I have been involved with capacitor and resistor upgrades 

look at humble homemade hifi capacitor reviews you can see a bit about the grading 15 being the most most are using Solen, or Mundorf cheaper Evo line 

even in $20k+ loudspeakers , sad but true. The Dynaudio I rebuilt transformed them $well over $1k in parts but thespeaker is 20% better sounding which is huge 

and = to the next more $$ expensive model $50% more monies.

@erik_squires curious if the newer Focal's have that same edge I've heard from the tweeters as the older models you had back in the day? At a friend's we have tried firing them straight out and then toeing them in 1/2 " at a time but still found the highs not to my liking. Personally I've always preferred soft dome tweeters but YMMV it's really such a subjective issue, we all hear things so differently.

Nice write up Erik. I only have an older pair from when they were called JM Labs, a pair of Tantal 509s and yes, the tweeter is very bright and sometimes fatiguing. They are in a 3rd system so no biggie.

my Focal experience is in the car, and those titanium inverted dome tweeters in the front pillars sing and ring!  About as good a reproduction as one can get of the live sound of a drummer riding a cymbal, might well be fatiguing in the home, but you need some extra signal in the car when giving consideration to the noise floor.  In my experience, soft domes go tink tink and decay too fast.  one of life's tradeoffs- ie. cannot expect silk or a polymer to sound like metal.  works for me as I listen to rock and electric blues in the car, more variety at home .