Focal Utopia: A headphone for high-fidelity experience

Chances are that you haven’t heard of the French audio company called Focal. The company has been making high-end speakers for over 35 years but has started making headphones recently. The company’s first headphone, the Spirit One, debuted in 2012 and recently, the company announced its $4,000 flagship headphone, the Focal Utopia.

After listening to all types of highend headphones, Focal wasn’t satisfied with how these headphones weren’t able to reproduce the spaciousness of being at a live concert. With that goal in mind, Focal sought to make its Utopia headphones the most spacious and comfortable headphones on the market.

The Utopia uses Beryllium in its 40mm drivers, which is useful for its rigidity and lightness. This ensures sonic accuracy and low distortion, enabling the drivers to vibrate up to 50,000 times per second. Beryllium also costs 30 times more than gold, making it an expensive material to use. Other exotic materials, usually found on supercars, include carbon fibre which is used for the headphone forks.

Carbon fibre is known for being lightweight and strong, helping to reduce the weight of the Utopia. They still weigh just over a pound (around half a kilogram) so they’re not the lightest headphones out there but should be comfortable for long listening sessions. And those earpads? They’re made from lambskin.

If $4,000 is too rich for your blood, Focal has the Elear, which slots in right under the Utopia in the company’s headphone line up. It’s still not cheap, at $999, but it should sound great compared to other headphones in the $1,000 price range.