This is a review, listening tests and measurements of the Focal Dome Flax home theater lifestyle speaker. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $689 by itself or $4,000 as part of a 5.1 package with a subwoofer.
The Dome is extremely attractive especially in this white color. Everything but the cover for the bottom is made out of metal and the dome rotates from facing up to about 20 degrees relative to horizontal (as seen). Wiring is on the bottom and I was pleasantly surprised that it accepted pretty thick wire (screw terminal). Alas, routing that cable out caused the cover to not fully close.
For testing I left the grill on assuming that is how anyone buying this speaker would use it. I propped the speaker forward so that the speaker was almost vertical (probably still slanted back 5 to 10 degrees). In other words, the measurements are more or less the on-axis response. If you use it at other angles, look at the responses for those. My measurements show that performance suffers good bit that way.
Focal Dome Flax Speaker Measurements
As usual, we start with our anechoic response:
I saw that rather severe variation from flat response in room and was hoping it wouldn't show up in anechoic measurements but it did. Directivity is very good though so in theory, you could EQ the error out. Here is our near-field response if you want to guess as to the issues there:
The elevated treble response seems to be caused by the woofer energy not being attenuated above crossover region.
Early window is as bad as on-axis courtesy of good directivity:
Resulting in pretty uneven predicted in-room response:
The little woofer really struggles in such a small enclosure, producing lots of distortion. So much so that I limited the testing to 90 dBSPL:
I will show you the absolute distortion levels but note that these measurements are not very representative when frequency response is not flat:
As already mentioned, directivity is very good:
Even vertical is decent for a non-coaxial speaker:
Impedance drops pretty low:
Waterfall shows a couple of clear resonances:
Finally, here is the step response:
Focal Dome Flax Speaker Listening Tests
Quick impression is not bad but you can immediately hear the forward nature of the treble. So I started to design a few filters evening out the response from 1 to 3 kHz. And putting in a shelving filter for high frequencies. The sound was now more balanced with the bass response coming to the front. But that is where problems started. The bass is just ugly here. The enclosure resonates and vibrates like crazy with each note resulting in buzzy sound. And here, we are talking about upper bass. Lower bass response is just not there resulting in faint, tubby notes. In some sense no EQ was better as the higher frequencies dominated the sound rather than the so inaccurate bass.
Conclusions
There are incredible design constraints here to have a high-output tiny speaker made to look nice. One's hopes go up though when a top tier speaker company produces a product for this category and prices it quite high as to indicate the laws of physics were cheated. Alas, they were not. Sure, this is probably better than a $100 plastic computer speaker. But it doesn't rise to a level that I call good enough high fidelity. Get this speaker because you think it looks good, not because you have any dreams of it producing great sound.
I can't recommend the Focal Dome Flax speaker.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The Dome is extremely attractive especially in this white color. Everything but the cover for the bottom is made out of metal and the dome rotates from facing up to about 20 degrees relative to horizontal (as seen). Wiring is on the bottom and I was pleasantly surprised that it accepted pretty thick wire (screw terminal). Alas, routing that cable out caused the cover to not fully close.
For testing I left the grill on assuming that is how anyone buying this speaker would use it. I propped the speaker forward so that the speaker was almost vertical (probably still slanted back 5 to 10 degrees). In other words, the measurements are more or less the on-axis response. If you use it at other angles, look at the responses for those. My measurements show that performance suffers good bit that way.
Focal Dome Flax Speaker Measurements
As usual, we start with our anechoic response:
I saw that rather severe variation from flat response in room and was hoping it wouldn't show up in anechoic measurements but it did. Directivity is very good though so in theory, you could EQ the error out. Here is our near-field response if you want to guess as to the issues there:
The elevated treble response seems to be caused by the woofer energy not being attenuated above crossover region.
Early window is as bad as on-axis courtesy of good directivity:
Resulting in pretty uneven predicted in-room response:
The little woofer really struggles in such a small enclosure, producing lots of distortion. So much so that I limited the testing to 90 dBSPL:
I will show you the absolute distortion levels but note that these measurements are not very representative when frequency response is not flat:
As already mentioned, directivity is very good:
Even vertical is decent for a non-coaxial speaker:
Impedance drops pretty low:
Waterfall shows a couple of clear resonances:
Finally, here is the step response:
Focal Dome Flax Speaker Listening Tests
Quick impression is not bad but you can immediately hear the forward nature of the treble. So I started to design a few filters evening out the response from 1 to 3 kHz. And putting in a shelving filter for high frequencies. The sound was now more balanced with the bass response coming to the front. But that is where problems started. The bass is just ugly here. The enclosure resonates and vibrates like crazy with each note resulting in buzzy sound. And here, we are talking about upper bass. Lower bass response is just not there resulting in faint, tubby notes. In some sense no EQ was better as the higher frequencies dominated the sound rather than the so inaccurate bass.
Conclusions
There are incredible design constraints here to have a high-output tiny speaker made to look nice. One's hopes go up though when a top tier speaker company produces a product for this category and prices it quite high as to indicate the laws of physics were cheated. Alas, they were not. Sure, this is probably better than a $100 plastic computer speaker. But it doesn't rise to a level that I call good enough high fidelity. Get this speaker because you think it looks good, not because you have any dreams of it producing great sound.
I can't recommend the Focal Dome Flax speaker.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
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And this price on top of it...
