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Focal Clear Review (headphone)

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amirm

amirm

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This is almost unanimously one of the best headphones out there. I have two Focal headphones and I've never been able to get either to clip. You have to have an extreme bass boost or be listening at hearing damage levels. Not recommending these is a disservice to the headphone community and will cause people to miss one of the best headphones out there.
Seems like the concept of me holding companies up to a high standard is not understood. :) A mechanic has a different opinion of a car than just a driver. He knows what could be weak points and evaluates the product that way. When we bought our boat we had our neighbor that taught boat safety to come and teach us about it. He opens the engine compartment and immediate points to zip ties holding engine wiring to engine hoses. He said due to high vibration they will act as knives and cut right through the hose, leaving you stranded on the water. And boy was he right as I took those off to replace them with clamps and could already see them cutting through the rubber hoses.

So no, I am not part of the "headphone community." I have no attachment to any product I test and hold them all universally to a high standard. If you want to not know what I find, then don't read my reviews. A headphone that bottoms out is not "one of the best." If it is by design, then it needs to say so in product manual and website. To the extent this is not there, then I need to point it out.

On tonality, it is better than other headphones I have tested so far without EQ and I indicated so. The issue is that it needs some bass boost and that makes the above problem much worse. If others are not perceiving these weaknesses, then they are not critical listeners and their opinion is no concern of mine, no matter how many of them there are.
 

Rusty Shackleford

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This is almost unanimously one of the best headphones out there. I have two Focal headphones and I've never been able to get either to clip. You have to have an extreme bass boost or be listening at hearing damage levels. Not recommending these is a disservice to the headphone community and will cause people to miss one of the best headphones out there.

Indeed. Check out Tyll’s old review and measurements. Unless one has a faulty unit, they will not clip unless listening at volumes that are damaging to hearing.
 

Artaois

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Seems like the concept of me holding companies up to a high standard is not understood. :) A mechanic has a different opinion of a car than just a driver. He knows what could be weak points and evaluates the product that way. When we bought our boat we had our neighbor that taught boat safety to come and teach us about it. He opens the engine compartment and immediate points to zip ties holding engine wiring to engine hoses. He said due to high vibration they will act as knives and cut right through the hose, leaving you stranded on the water. And boy was he right as I took those off to replace them with clamps and could already see them cutting through the rubber hoses.

So no, I am not part of the "headphone community." I have no attachment to any product I test and hold them all universally to a high standard. If you want to not know what I find, then don't read my reviews. A headphone that bottoms out is not "one of the best." If it is by design, then it needs to say so in product manual and website. To the extent this is not there, then I need to point it out.

On tonality, it is better than other headphones I have tested so far without EQ and I indicated so. The issue is that it needs some bass boost and that makes the above problem much worse. If others are not perceiving these weaknesses, then they are not critical listeners and their opinion is no concern of mine, no matter how many of them there are.
Bottoming out at extremely high levels or highly elevated bass is not something to hold against them. You can crank a lot of headphones up to beyond listening levels and make them mechanically malfunction. I'd like to know some of the tracks people are using to bottom them out because I've never been able to get my 2 Focals to.
Like I said there's a reason this and the extremely similar but much cheaper Elex are some of the most beloved headphones.
 

pwjazz

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Folks are wondering at what level I "listen" to headphones. Answer is that it is pretty low for bulk of the time. For *evaluating* headphones, I listen at wide range of levels for brief periods to represent all listeners of these products. Listening at higher levels allows me to evaluate limits of products and represent a larger set of people who may buy them.

But yes, compared to my son who is in his 20s, I do listen at louder level. So there. :)

Not to be pedantic, but a measurement would be nice. Personally, on typical compressed pop material I'll generally be at around 65-75dB SPL(A), and when I really want to focus on the music I'll get up to 85dB.
 
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amirm

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Bottoming out at extremely high levels or highly elevated bass is not something to hold against them.
They are not being evaluated at "extremely high levels." They are being tested at listening levels that I prefer for some tracks with equalization. Without yes, it takes higher and less realistic levels. But not with. I have tested tons of headphones and these bottom out much, much earlier than them and far, far less gracefully.
 
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amirm

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Not to be pedantic, but a measurement would be nice. Personally, on typical compressed pop material I'll generally be at around 65-75dB SPL(A), and when I really want to focus on the music I'll get up to 85dB.
Compressed pop would be the wrong kind of music to determine levels on due to low crest factor, making everything sound as loud as it can.

And how did you measure such? Why did you use A-weighting when we are talking about sub bass response?
 

DivineCurrent

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Thanks for the review Amir, I always appreciate your new headphone reviews.
I own the Clear, and before that the Elex. I was actually quite surprised by your EQ settings, because they don’t address the two peaks I’m hearing with the Clear. I have developed an EQ curve over the past few months when doing sine sweeps, and to my ears, there are audible narrow peaks at around 5.8 kHz, and 10.5 kHz. When those two areas are addressed (-5 dB each), to me it sounds like a more detailed and much quicker HD650. Yes, there is also the 1.5 kHz bump, but that doesn’t really bother me though.
But the clipping issue is something I never had a problem with in either the Clear or the Elex, so that is a unit by unit thing probably. And I often listen to EDM and bass heavy music.
 
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Like I said there's a reason this and the extremely similar but much cheaper Elex are some of the most beloved headphones.
Every headphone is beloved. As is just about every audio gear I test. That is neither here, nor there. Listeners en masse are easy to please. Please let's not bring such comments into review threads. I am not measuring belovedness of an audio product. I am measuring their technical performance.
 
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And I often listen to EDM and bass heavy music.
EDM music does NOT have the deep lows that cause the bottoming out. Indeed many speakers with poor low frequency response play EDM with ease. EDM has "bass" and plenty of it but it is not deep bass. When I get back to my workstation I will post some proper test tracks.
 

Maki

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EDM music does NOT have the deep lows that cause the bottoming out. Indeed many speakers with poor low frequency response play EDM with ease. EDM has "bass" and plenty of it but it is not deep bass. When I get back to my workstation I will post some proper test tracks.
Depends on the track I'd think. Here's a snippet from one of my future bass songs. Sub-20hz bass hit.
1608495405218.png
 

genrl

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EDM music does NOT have the deep lows that cause the bottoming out. Indeed many speakers with poor low frequency response play EDM with ease. EDM has "bass" and plenty of it but it is not deep bass. When I get back to my workstation I will post some proper test tracks.
I like how you can categorize all tracks in one genre, some ability that must be
 
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amirm

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I like how you can categorize all tracks in one genre, some ability that must be
I was returning the favor that EDM by definition has deep bass! :)
 

Maki

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0dBFS @15Hz?
Do you want to destroy subwoofers?
Should clarify it's not "my track", it's ジェリーフィッシュ (feat. ローラーガール) by Yunomi. It's a brief section at the very end.
 

Robbo99999

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3.6 q eq above 10k is absurd. Amir's eq suggestions seem fairly sane but you shouldn't need +/-5db eq on a $1500 transducer.

My opinion about headphones not being remotely hifi remains. I thought focal was one of the best measuring headphones, too! Better off buying some little KH80 monitors and sticking them on your head with bungee cords.
Yep, exactly, like I said above 10kHz the frequency response is very unpredictable so applying a Q3.6 filter above 10kHz is non-sensical, especially at the 19kHz @HDavidson mentioned! I disagree on headphones not being HiFi, they can be if they're EQ'd accurately to what you perceive to be neutral, especially if you've got some flat reference speakers to compare them against. Also you get to hear a lot of the bottom end of tracks in an unadulterated way that you would struggle to using speakers due to room effects below say 300Hz (as well as the low frequency extension unless using subs)....so you can get a very clean low end that will be very revealing on your favourite tracks.....also they can be very low distortion (more so than speakers) in the mids & treble, and in my experience this can elucidate elements in your favourite tracks in the middle & upper end too. Soundstage is probably the worst element of headphones, it's hard to have a headphone that has the soundstage of speakers - I think that involves choosing the right headphone and having an EQ that is pretty close to your own personal HRTF.
I'm sure. Applying Q = 0.36 the entire high frequency zone will go down and will not correspond to the oratory1990 filter schedule.
This is what a correction looks like with Q = 3.6

And turned off 12638 Hz.
Oratory doesn't use any filter at 12kHz for the Focal Clear (https://www.dropbox.com/s/hqb9zjsvc2nu5zc/Focal Clear.pdf?dl=0), and previously you were talking about 19kHz anyway....so I'm not sure what planet you're visiting presently as you're being very inconsistent on a number of points/facts as well as between your own posts. :p But either way you don't want to be applying high Q filters above 10kHz (eg. your Q3.6 that you mentioned previously at 19kHz), Oratory doesn't do it & it doesn't make sense to do so.
On what I export, you all need to build consensus and tell me what you want. I am just responding to what is asked.
I would definitely like to see the raw measurements being exported, as I use those to create EQ's.
You can add a sharp LF cutoff but it isn't present in most music anyway. Perhaps not use these to listen to vinyl . :D
I think there's quite a bit of electronic music that has significant presence down to 20Hz & below.....last time I saw some tracks analyzed (including some that I listen to if I remember rightly, I think Muse Supermassive Black Hole was one).
 
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amirm

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I think there's quite a bit of electronic music that has significant presence down to 20Hz & below.....last time I saw some tracks analyzed (including some that I listen to if I remember rightly, I think Muse Supermassive Black Hole was one).
That is a necessary but insufficient condition to bring out this driver issue. If upper frequencies are very loud, you are inclined to keep levels low and with it, not cause the driver to bottom out. All of my "speaker killer" tracks are rather quiet yet still hit this weakness.
 

dmac6419

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I sold my Clears last year due to the driver clipping issue. I usually listen at lower levels so it rarley cropped up, usually only on really bass-heavy passages. But, just knowing that it was even capable of this was a deal breaker because I had a hard time accepting this "design feature" in a headphone at this price. They did sound nice though, so it's a shame they had such an issue. I did get pair of Elegias some months ago and can report that my Elegia exhibit no such clipping even at insane volumes (for test purposes, not for listening - gotta protect your ears!).
So glad I didn't pull the trigger,I would have been pissed,They were my next headphone purchase until this review.
 

Robbo99999

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That is a necessary but insufficient condition to bring out this driver issue. If upper frequencies are very loud, you are inclined to keep levels low and with it, not cause the driver to bottom out. All of my "speaker killer" tracks are rather quiet yet still hit this weakness.
Yes, that makes sense, and also or in addition if you EQ up the bass.
 
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