I own the LS60s and have a naim 200 series system with reference 1 metas and agree with you that the LS60s are a steal at 5k. I got a chance to listen to the Divas when the local dealer had them on demo. It was roughly a 15 x 20 well treated room. My first thought was wow these sound a lot better than I anticipated. Are they 8x better than the LS60? That's subjective of course but they are on a couple levels up without a doubt.
Enough of the Stereophile futuristic statements about the Focal Diva Utopia
There have been multiple times that Stereophile has claimed the Focal Diva Utopia is a futuristic product. In the last issue of Stereophile, they did a review of this speaker. The 1st paragraph, he referenced "2001: a space odyssey". 2nd paragraph, states: "I am sitting earthbound".... "almost a quarter century beyond the year 2001, living a similar scenario with the Focal Diva Utopia". Then it goes on: "I feel more in a sci-fi future young me".
There is nothing futuristic about these speakers that haven't been done many years before now. We have had active speakers for decades. We have had all the features of this Focal speaker in other speakers for a few years now.
The speaker that has had these features plus more are the Kef LS60 and the Kef LS50 wireless II.
My take on these Focal Diva Utopia:
1) ugly, the felt/carpet on the cabinet is cheap looking
2) doesn't do Roon
3) sounded terrible at the latest audio show. Normally the smaller Focal speakers have no bottom end, but these speakers added more woofers and they produced terrible bass.
4) $40,000!!!
Compared to the Kef LS60:
1) The LS60 speaker is an active version of a baby Kef blade. Very similar. When I played with these for a couple of hours, I got to listen to the owners Blade speakers.
2) More features, settings done by iPhone, does Roon. It's also very easy to hook up 1 of the Kef subwoofers and have them mesh well with the LS60.
3) Gorgeous! Many different colors to choose from, even the drivers can be different colors
4) $5000!!!!!!!! Steal of the century
5) Sound quality, excellent! Like I mentioned earlier, these speakers have you think twice about moving up to the Blades. Tight Bass, Very nice Mids/Highs.
If you are thinking about: downsizing your equipment to just a couple of high quality pieces without losing any sound quality, you can cut it down to 1, all you need is an ethernet cable to stream Roon from your server or if you are using them for both music and video, these have the earc input too.
Bottomline: After hearing both of these speakers, the Kefs are far superior sounding and are $35,000 cheaper than the Focals. They are so good, I'm going to replace my $20,000 2nd system with a pair of the LS60's.
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- 14 posts total
- 14 posts total