In Reply to: RE: Unload the Focals - 2nd that posted by Presto on January 3, 2015 at 16:47:32:
I listen to a pair of the beryllium Focal tweeters at a distance of 1 meter. As originally set up they were brutal on overly bright recordings, such as the Mercury Living Presence CDs. This remained even after I removed obvious reflections from my listening environment.
The cure was simple. On the back of my Focal Twin-6be monitors there was a treble control. I turned it half way down. This amounted to a 3.5 dB roll-off at 10 kHz (no more than 4 db at any higher frequency according to the manual). At this point the most balanced recordings sounded neutral, such as the Reference Recordings orchestral recordings, while the Mercs sounded slightly bright but musical and not annoying at all. I don't find any of my library annoyingly bright or excessively rolled off. A natural tonal balance can be realized by nothing more than adjusting the volume control.
What I get on a good hi-res recording is an amazing presence that raises the hairs on your arms. Really natural strings on the Late Beethoven Quartets by the Cypress String Quartet. (This recording has high frequencies up to the 40 kHz rating of these tweeters.) These speakers also provide natural drum kit sound at in the room volumes, as seen on "Little Drummer Boy", an extra on Lyn Stanley's "Lost in Romance". Both of these recordings can be found on Blue Coast Records.
No kids or pets around, so I am not afraid of being poisoned by any Beryllium dust from damaged tweeters.
I would not recommend these speakers to anyone who is not prepared to spend several days (it took me weeks) setting them up with the help of a calibrated microphone and RTA software. These were needed to get good in-room bass response. The high frequency house curve was pretty easy to dial in by ear given a set of reference recordings.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: Unload the Focals - 2nd that - Tony Lauck 01/3/1517:21:39 01/3/15 (2)
- RE: Unload the Focals - 2nd that - Presto 12:45:26 01/4/15 (1)
- RE: Unload the Focals - 2nd that - Tony Lauck 13:31:42 01/4/15 (0)