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Focal Utopia Be

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 12:03 am
by JeremyC
Check this out, looks like focal has a new tweeter they are comming out with. I wonder how it sounds compared to the old utopia tweets.

http://www.focal-fr.com/car/en/utopiabe/mainframe.htm

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 10:01 am
by GlassWolf
gotta wait and see I suppose.

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 12:38 pm
by William from NOLA
I hope it isn't as harsh as theirs typically are. I'm a fan of little EQing.

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 2:05 pm
by Jonathan
Basic benefit of beryllium is that it's stiffness to weight ratio is highest of all known metals, is very stiff (more than titanium). The self damping isn't all that great, BUT the good thing is that the stiffness of the diaphragm usually raises its resonances to well over 50 kHz, which helps a lot since even harmonics don't make a huge effect. Beryllium is hard to manufacture because the toxicity of the metal, it is very dangerous. If it's well executed, it should be a great tweeter. I'm sure Focal wouldn't do anything to jeopardize their reputation, anyway.

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 4:54 am
by GlassWolf
well.. they're already French...

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:14 am
by Jonathan
"well.. they're already French..."

hehe, point taken :)

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 1:49 pm
by 6three6mafia6
they look very promissing, so what does that little eq like thing do? how come the knobs say 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 insted of hz ???

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 8:33 pm
by JeremyC
Its called the CROSSBLOCK. Here is what I found on the site about it.

"Our Crossblock is not an equalizer. It is not a corrector either- our loudspeakers don't need any !
It is a fantastic tool, which helps to precisely adapt the crossover to the acoustical characteristics of the car in order to integrate its acoustics into the whole sound system, the source, the amplifiers and above all, the loudspeakers. Without this thought process, there would e no hope of truthful music reproduction.
But the making of a perfect crossover, versatile and efficient brought up an expected obstacle : multiplying the adjustement possibilities, therefore the number of components would have called for over a hundreds of parts, something unrealistic, considering the size limits of the crossover itself. The only way would have been to use small size components, which would have been detrimental to efficiency.
Once more necessity was mother of invention. Instead of using more than 10 coils we designed a single Multicoil air core inductor which is in essence, thanks to multiple connection points within the winding, 10 coils wound at once into one. This allowed us to use a very large gauge copper wire, which guarantees a very low insertion loss. The same way, instead of using a multitude of capacitors, we designed a Multicap capacitor, which is nothing else but a number of different values capacitors wound together as one. These Multicaps are indeed high efficiency metallized polypropylene capacitors made with the strictest specifications by SCR. We also use high quality switches with very low insertion loss, and we even went as far as wiring in parallel some of the terminals of the switch to further lower the series resistance down to less than a thousandth of an Ohm.
To go with the extraordinary performance of the drive units used on these systems, we couldn't accept any compromise, so nothing could deprive you of the most refined tuning system ever designed for your car.
We are giving you the unique opportunity in just a few clicks, to almost infinitely refine and enrich the sound in your car, while discovering the essence of the Utopia Be sound."

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 1:55 pm
by Jonathan
That's nice and all, but I'm more of the less is more mentality, audio is built upon simple principles. I'd rather tailor the install to the speakers than the speakers to the install. It generally gives better results.