Friday, September 18, 2015

Focal Sopra

Focal just introduced the Sopra speaker line.

I find it very interesting, and in some ways it's a marriage of the Profile and Electra lines, with a dash of Utopia thrown in.  The color finishes are pretty too, but I'm not really completely enamored of the shape.  At least I find them less ugly than the current Utopia line.  What I'm most interested in however is how "tweakable" it is.  Focal makes excellent drivers in many ways, especially low distortion and low storage of energy.  Flat, smooth frequency response however is not their forte. Also, their cabinets and crossover components below the Utopia line kind of suck by comparison.   There is some, but not extensive, internal bracing allowing unusually large amounts of vibration to come off the sides.   I can already tell by the pictures they have shown they are not particularly proud of the crossovers in this unit.  Not that they were ill designed, but probably did not have the highest quality components.

I'm sure we'll be reading about the performance of the Sopra's in gushing details from "unbiased" reviewers soon, and by that I mean to exclude all of TAS, but what I would really want to know is if the Sopra's are a few hundred dollars away in mods from being small Utopia's? 


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