Seldom has a loudspeaker looked so striking. Focal's Grande Utopia EM is the French speaker specialist's statement model, a tour de force which, even in a large listening room, looks fearsomely imposing. Standing over 2m tall it even overshadows Wilson Audio's mighty Alexandria XLF. It has a slightly larger footprint as well, and weighs only 20kilos less than a Steinway Model O living-room grand!
So it's hard not to drool over this granddaddy of Focal's top-line Utopia III model range, whose lineage dates back two decades to the introduction of the first Grande Utopia in 1995. Now in its third generation, it's been described by some as an 'acoustical sculpture' thanks to the uniquely shaped articulated enclosure, which Focal calls Focus Time.
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| Focal Grande Utopia EM |
The speaker actually consists of a plinth and five separate enclosures: a tweeter section in the centre is flanked by two conjoined cabinets above (one containing a 165mm midrange driver and the uppermost a reflex-loaded 270mm bass driver) and two fi xed cabinets below it (a further 165mm midrange driver and, at the bottom, a whopping 400mm/16in sub-bass driver that operates below 50Hz).
Separate, stacked enclosure modules might not be revolutionary in loudspeaker design, several companies employing this approach to fi ne-tune driver placement and arrival time relative to the listening sweet spot, but in the Grande Utopia Focal's implementation is nothing short of fabulous! A crank handle, parked behind a drop-down flap at the rear, fits into a socket in the back of the tweeter cabinet. Each turn of the handle adjusts the position of the tweeter relative to the midrange and bass drivers below it, while simultaneously raising or lowering the upper two cabinets by exactly twice as much as the tweeter enclosure – thus preserving the correct 'arc' of the baffles. A numerical counter allows you to set the angles precisely and repeatedly in just a matter of moments.
SETTING A BALANCE TO TASTE
Also at the rear are a series of jumpers for fine-tuning the speaker in situ. Three-step settings provide tweaking of the crossover slopes between midrange and treble as well as tweeter and midbass levels and sub-bass Q. The Grande's sub-bass woofer employs an electromagnetic motor system, whose separate power supply unit furthermore has six level-settings for balancing the overall performance to taste.
Focal manufactures everything in-house. The company owns a substantial cabinet works, builds its own drivers, and even boasts a clean room in which its fabricates its beryllium foil tweeters. The company's 27mm IAL2 – 'infi nite acoustic loading' – inverted dome tweeter is mounted on a precision-machined metal sub-baffle and the rear of the dome and its surround operate into free air behind, loaded by a tuned cavity.
Boasting a claimed bandwidth of 1kHz-40kHz, its motor system employs a neodymium 'focus ring' magnet assembly to provide a high field strength. Meanwhile the midrange, bass and sub-bass drivers feature Focal's thirdgeneration 'W' composite sandwich cones formed of Rohacell foam and varying thicknesses of adhesiveimpregnated glass fibre material, trimmed by a laser cutter for precise termination with their surrounds.
The company claims that by controlling the thickness of the foam and the layers of glass fibre tissue it can dial in the characteristics it requires for any given design, optimising a cone's behaviour for the desired operating frequency range.
The motor system in the 270mm midbass driver features a multiferrite magnet, while the two 165mm midrange drivers employ Focal's familiar 'Power Flower' arrangement where seven small-diameter ferrites form a ring around the voice coil. Regarding its 400mm EM driver (in which 7kg of copper wire replaces a 'traditional' permanent magnet) the company says that, compared to the driver featured in the previous Grande Utopia, it offers an 80% increase in available magneticfield, an 88% increase in the force applied to accelerate the cone, increased sensitivity, a lower resonant frequency, and a reduction in distortion by a factor of almost four. The speaker's four-way network is divided into three separate blocks, with crossover points at 80Hz, 220Hz and 2.2kHz.
The multiple-enclosure cabinet is a work of art, formed of 5cm-thick MDF panels heavily lacquered to an immaculate gloss finish. Stock colours are white carrara, imperial red, hot chocolate and black lacquer, with custom colours to order.
AN ENORMOUS SPREAD
Oh boy... it's impossible not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the sound image produced by these beautiful behemoths. Hearing them conjured up memories of seminal experiences from my youth – such as my fi rst encounters with ceiling-high Beveridges and Infi nity's awe-inspiring IRS system of yore.
In the modern era they stand comparison with the aforementioned Wilson Alexandria XLF, Sonus faber's Aida and a select group of statement designs which anyone able to contemplate owning needs to hear for themselves before whipping out their
platinum Amex cards.
Driven by a Devialet 800 dual-mono amplifier system in the editor's media room and fed a healthy diet of CD-resolution and hi-res digital music files, the pair of Grande Utopia EMs threw up an enormous sonic picture, creating life-sized images of musicians with consummate ease. And they sure as heck could move some air! We found ourselves pumping the gas as much as we dared, creating rock concert sound pressure levels, and these Focal flagships showed no signs of stress whatsoever.
Playing the hypnotically infectious 'Dreaming' from 2011's Duo collaboration [Jazzland Recordings 060252770419] by Norwegian Jazz pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and German techno producer Henrik Schwartz on synthesizers, showcased the Focal speaker's startling dynamic capability as the pulsing music moved ever upward. It handled the explosive bass thwacks
seemingly with contempt, as the music rattled our ribcages.
FAST ON ITS FEET
While many monster monitors capable of delivering oodles of bass down to subsonic frequencies can sometimes appear subjectively 'slow' and ponderous, the Grande Utopia EM sounds tremendously fast and agile. Indeed with certain music we actually found them a little too sharp-edged, even 'stark'.
Of course, when hearing familiar recordings through such a massive 'window' it's all too easy to become critical of poor microphone quality and shoddy recording production. But with some 'reference' material we were surprised by some spikiness and a degree of coarseness. For example, with the Hoff Ensemble's Quiet Winter Night acoustic jazz project [2L-087] played from a 192kHz/24-bit file, despite the speaker's agility the sound appeared very slightly hazy, the instruments' leading-edge transients mildly blurred.
Of course, we enjoyed many delightful surprises. The Beatles' 'And I Love Her' from the 2009 44.1kHz/24-bit remaster of A Hard Day's Night sounded delectably intimate – as if Macca had popped in to grant us a personal rendition – and when switching to party mood the pumping bass lines of Nelly's 'Pimp Juice' and 'Hot In Here' from his classic Nellyville [Universal 017 747-2] brought grins of satisfaction all round.
Our test measurements reveal that there remains room for further refinement in this ambitious and innovative speaker design. But in a large listening room and partnered with cost-no-object ancillaries they can sound mighty grand.
LAB REPORT: FOCAL GRANDE UTOPIA EM
Focal claims a very high 94dB sensitivity for the Grande Utopia EM but our measured pink noise result of 90.7dB suggests hat this is around 3dB optimistic. Low impedance is used to help achieve this fi gure, Focal's specifi ed nominal impedance of 8ohm making little sense given that it also states a minimum value of 3.0ohm. We measured the lowest impedance to be 2.9ohm at 90Hz. While impedance phase angles are quite well controlled, the EPDR (equivalent peak dissipation resistance, which takes into account phase angle) drops to a low of 1.6ohm at 216Hz. For a speaker of this size and cost, that rates as relatively amplifi er friendly, being little worse than most smaller, cheaper floorstanders.
Frequency response, measured on the tweeter axis [Graph 1, below], is highly uneven about a convex trend, with errors of ±4.2dB (200Hz-20kHz). This measurement was taken, as usual, at 1m distance but repeating it at 2m elicited little improvement, so the irregularities are not caused by time misalignment of the midrange drivers and tweeter. Pair matching over the same frequency range was poor at ±1.8dB but the largest disparities were narrow-band between 5kHz and 6kHz – everywhere else the matching was to within ±1.0dB. Despite the beryllium tweeter the response peaks at a low 26kHz before rolling off steeply beyond. The diffractioncorrected near-fi eld bass response reached 34Hz (–6dB re. 200Hz). The reason for the ragged response is obvious from the cumulative spectral decay waterfall [Graph 2], which shows a series of prominent high-Q resonances above 3kHz, presumably caused by breakup modes in the midrange cones.
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| Forward response is surprisingly uneven – the broad trend convex, dipping through the midrange |
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| Cumulative decay waterfall reveals a series of modes above 3kHz, presumably from the mid drivers |
VERDICT: Sound Quality: 80%
SPECIFICATIONS
Sensitivity (SPL/1m/2.83Vrms – Mean/IEC/Music) : 90.1dB/90.7dB/90.3dB
Impedance modulus min/max (20Hz–20kHz) : 2.9ohm @ 90Hz - 15.1ohm @ 2.1kHz
Impedance phase min/max (20Hz–20kHz) : –17o @ 79Hz - 44o @ 1.2kHz
Pair matching (200Hz–20kHz) : ±1.8dB
LF/HF extension (–6dB ref 150Hz/10kHz) : 34Hz / 39.2kHz/38.2kHz
THD 100Hz/1kHz/10kHz (for 90dB SPL/1m) : 0.2% / 0.4% / 0.1%
Dimensions (HWD) : 2012x654x880mm
