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Review of Focal Solo6 Be Monitors, and Sub6 Subwoofer Focal is a French company that has dominated the audiophile speaker market since it’s inception in the 1970’s. With award winning designs that included some of the first uses of tioxid, aluminum-magnesium and beryllium in tweeters, as well as poly-Kevlar and poly-glass in woofers, Focal is known for speaker designs that push the boundaries of performance and sonic realism. In 2002, Focal introduced their first studio monitor, the SM11. Though the objective of a studio monitor’s design is different than that of a home audio speaker, the decades of research and development provided Focal with a unique technological foundation from which to design some of the most innovative studio monitors on the market today. Along with Barefoot (see my review of the MM27s in Tape-Op #58) and ADAM, Focal helps to form what I consider to be the vanguard of studio monitor designers who are quickly catching up with the ever-increasing resolution, bandwidth and dynamic range of modern audio. Specifically, these companies are developing monitors that extend higher (up to 40kHz) and lower (down to 30Hz) with extremely reduced distortion, resulting in unprecedented transparency. With the Solo6 Be model, Focal has aimed to bring their cutting-edge technology to a more reasonable price-point ($2000 street). At first glance, the Solo6s don’t look exceedingly pioneering. The cabinet is nothing like Focal’s angular SM11 monitor with drivers on three sides, or the SM8 with a passive radiator on the top of the cabinet, or even the Twin6 with it’s pair of woofers straddling the tweeter like ADAM S3As. The Solo6 is an oddball in the Focal line of professional studio monitors for appearing so traditional: a smallish rectangular cabinet (13” tall x 9.5” wide x 11.4” deep) with a round tweeter mounted above a 6.5” woofer and a bass port across the bottom of the cabinet. However, the Solo6 packs in most of Focal’s innovative designs, and it’s good to know that they’ve cut no corners with this speaker to meet the price point. Everything, except the amp that powers the woofer, is made by hand in their French facility to exacting manufacturing standards. The cabinet consists of 19mm MDF panels with internal braces with real red veneer on the sides. At 24lbs each, they’re hefty for their size. On the back panel are the XLR input jack, IEC power cord socket, +4db or -10db operating level switch, and recessed high and low frequency contour pots set at 5k and 150Hz respectively, offering plus or minus 3db of adjustment for room tuning. The tweeter is an inverted beryllium dome (‘Be’ stands for beryllium on the periodic table of elements). This is the same tweeter found across the whole line of Focal’s studio monitors. The “Be” tweeter is one of the few products in the world made from pure beryllium, a material three times more rigid than titanium, and more expensive than gold. At an astonishing 25 microns thick, it is capable of reproducing frequencies up to 40kHz at a velocity nearly 3 times faster than titanium and 2.5 times faster than aluminum. The sample dome sent to me was so light I could barely feel it resting in my hand. Rather than develop a “super tweeter” to handle the far reaching high-end response of today’s audio, Focal designed the inverted beryllium dome to avoid the filtering effects that sound waves emitted from non-concentric tweeter and super tweeter pairings can generate. A generous 100-watt class-AB amplifier powers the tweeter. Also surprisingly light in the hand is the W-Cone, a descendent of Focal’s Poly-K sandwich cone of the 1980s. Photos of people making the W-Cones show a foam core being covered by hand with a thin woven glass tissue. By varying the thickness of the tissue and the internal foam, cones can be optimized to provide optimal damping qualities for their specific applications. For example, the Solo6 has a cone specific to its cabinet design that provides damping appropriate to its role as a woofer reaching down to 40Hz. The goal of the W-Cone is clarity, efficiency and neutrality. Low-end drivers are notorious for generating their own distortion and coloration; paper cones are said to sound “cardboardy,” and plastic cones, such as those made from polypropylene, are said to sound “plastickey.” The W-Cone provides an unprecedented stiffness-to-mass ratio that, to my ears, results in far less coloration of the low-end signal. If these woofers have a signature sound, it’s a distinctive lack of distortion. A 150-watt BASH amplifier powers the woofer. The BASH amp is the only component not built at the Focal factory, and is licensed from Indigo. BASH amplifiers marry the fidelity of class AB amps to the efficiency of class D amps. Without getting into the details of BASH technology, they have been designed to accommodate the heavy work of delivering the power needed at frequencies as low as 20Hz while staying cool and small enough to work in an enclosed speaker (to learn more about BASH technology and Indigo, visit www.bashaudio.com). So, while not looking all that tricked out at first, the Solo6 obviously packs in a lot of innovative, proprietary technology, and can be classed along with its bigger brothers and sisters in the Focal line, as well as it’s high-tech cousins in the ADAM and Barefoot lines. With a frequency response of 40Hz to 40kHz, call the Solo6s the little brothers of the revolution. Like many independent producers and engineers, I work in both larger commercial studios and my own studio. These days, I mostly work at Mavericks Studio in Manhattan and my studio in Brooklyn, where I have been working on a pair of ADAM P11As. I’ve always been delighted with my ADAMs, and had previously been working between them and ProAc Studio 100s and NS-10Ms at Mavericks. Then, last winter, Mavericks installed Barefoot MM27s. Suddenly I was monitoring in a new paradigm, and the amount of sonic information coming out of the MM27s seriously raised the bar for what I expect out of a pair of speakers. On the Barefoots I was working more confidently, more quickly, even more creatively. Simply put, the gap between my two workspaces had just widened considerably. Again and again, people said that if I liked the Barefoot experience I should try out a pair of Focals. I was excited to find a pair of their monitors at the $2000 mark; they wouldn’t break the bank, and would be the right size and power for my own studio (power, price and size are nearly identical to the ADAM P11A’s). Rumor had it that they could sound closer to the Barefoots, especially in the low-end detail and overall stereo imaging. Obviously the Solo6’s aren’t going to deliver the low-end reach that the Barefoots can, nor will they get as loud, nor will they do triple duty as near-fields, mastering speakers and large format mains. The question I had was, at lower volumes, in a smaller room, and as dedicated near-field monitors, how much of the detailed information I’d recently come to require from monitors could the Solo6s deliver? One benchmark question I now use when determining the transparency of monitors is “How different do different records sound from one another?” The way I see it, if records sound similar in color, tonality, frequency response, stereo imaging and / or depth of field, then something is consistently coloring, and homogenizing, the sound with its own sonic characteristics. According to the theory, the greater the difference between the sound of two records, the more accurately the speaker is representing the recording. (Of course, the converters, clocks and all else in the monitoring path should be relatively transparent. For my listening, I monitored with a Crane Song HEDD 192, using its internal clock, and played CD’s on a Sony CDP-D11.) Listening to a bunch of records through the Focals immediately revealed one very important thing: the unique sonic character of the low-end on different records was very easy to hear. Kick drums and bass guitars had as much detail in texture and color as the highs and mids, and not just the string and fret sounds of the bass, or the attack of the kick drum, but the contours of the low frequencies. Put on an old Who record, and Entwistle’s bass and Moon’s kick are just as characteristically defined as Townshend’s guitar and Daltrey’s voice. Put on an ABBA track, and the kick drums and bass guitars sound alarmingly miniscule and papery for music that made the world get up and dance. Put on Daniel Lenois’ Rockets to confirm that, yes, his kick drums really can be enormous, distorted low-end beasts. Put on an ECM record, and the spacious low-end resonance of that label’s signature room sound is plain as day. Oh, and that’s not an acoustic bass on that new Arcade Fire tune. It went on and on. That’s the kind of low-end detail I had wanted. One way to describe it is that I could actually hear the lack of distortion in the low-end, which meant that I could hear what was really on the record. So, different records sounded very different from one another. Even at high volumes the low-end was distinctly undistorted. Another great surprise is that if you turn the Solo6s down to a whisper, the low-end impact stays in tact and sounds full-range. No matter how loud or quiet, the Solo6s sound pretty much the same. This consistency made it possible to monitor quietly for longer periods of time, without worrying that the low end had strayed – good news for any eardrums. The ‘different records test’ showed off the detail and transparency of the Solo6’s mids and high-end, too. The tweeters sound airy, meaning that I can hear the space and dimension around high-end sounds. No two tambourines sounded the same; acoustic guitar pick sounds were fascinatingly different in character; ride cymbals, hats and snares all seemed nothing like each other from record to record; and the variation in the placement of string sections was fascinating. The Be tweeters deliver a ton of information, but in no way did they seem hyped. I heard a lot of detail without any over-excitement of the hi-end. The detail and clarity of the beryllium tweeter is uncannily well matched to the W-Cone, making for a very balanced, unified listening experience up and down the entire frequency spectrum. Next I checked out some of my recent mixes on the Solo6’s. I was relieved to hear that they sounded the way I had intended them to, though there were some new discoveries. Upon hearing one of my mixes for the Portland, Oregon band Time Farmer, I noticed that the ride cymbal wasn’t carrying the excitement of the song as much as I’d thought, and the acoustic guitar seemed to have more to say in the upper highs; at the same time I could hear more subtle changes in the ride’s overtones as their drummer changed his approach across the song. In general, there just seemed to be plenty of space in the stereo field for all the different high-end details going on. In the mid-range, the snare on the same song had more of a lower-mid ‘poof’ to it than I had thought, not quite cutting through the guitars. Re-checking it on other systems, this seemed to be the way it was translating – another indication that there’s little hype in the high-end with these speakers. In a song I produced with the Brooklyn band The Parachuters we wove some subtle and distorted sonic textures into the mixes, the kind of stuff you might discover after listening more extensively. While not all systems would reveal all the details buried in these mixes, an accurate studio monitor had best do so, and the Solo6s allowed me to hear all of it. Next I tried remixing a Time Farmer song on the Solo6’s, aiming to add some dimension and groove to an up-tempo, four-on-the-floor tune. I decided to soak some electric guitars in long delays running though an automated sweeping band-pass filter that fed a spring reverb. The idea was to create a slowly shifting wall of color behind the band. As with The Parachuters' track, the trick here was to keep the level of the effected signal on the threshold of perception, and for this mix hearing reverb tails clearly was really important in getting that balance right. On the Solo6’s, I was able to hear subtle changes in these effected signals clearly, and felt very confident placing them. I was really digging that inverted beryllium dome tweeter during this mix. To cajole the groove a bit, I played with compressors on the bass guitar, overheads and a multed snare track. Very subtle changes to the attack and release settings were easy to hear across the whole frequency spectrum. For rock, I tend to mix with an API-2500 Bus Compressor strapped to the mix bus, and I love the different sonic characteristics this unit can impart on a mix. Like the ‘different records test’, the differences between the various compressor settings on the API were blatant on the Solo6’s. In fact, I fiddle less with the API while working on the Focals because the settings I want to use seem pretty obvious after trying just a few different combinations. Same goes for the Crane Song HEDD192’s triode, pentode and tape processing, which I also like to use on the mix bus. After that remix, I was ready to mix from the ground up on the Solo6’s. This time it was a song for NYC-based songwriter Paul Britten, featuring Tony Levin on bass. Knowing Tony’s bass playing for may years prior to working with him made being able to hear the specific colors of his low tones especially rewarding and comforting. It was clearly Tony’s pink “Barbie flesh” five-string Music Man singing away down there. Placing a number of percussively percolating Stratocaster tracks across the stereo field went swiftly, and those that needed a little compression to control their transient peaks rapidly exposed themselves through the Solo6s. This mix came together fast, and has continued to translate outside the studio, especially in Paul’s van and on his girlfriend’s stereo, two critical sonic testing labs for this record. With the Focals on hand, I had a chance to track and mix a tune with producer Art Hays. Tracking to tape at 15ips, and monitoring on the Barefoots, we recorded a droning bass chord in D (fundamentals around 140Hz and 300Hz) and an un-muffled double-skinned bass drum tuned to resonate an octave below (at roughly 70Hz). The low-end chord produced by the bass and kick drum coming off of tape was a rich, warm woof on the Barefoots, but as you might guess, this could be a sticky glob of low-end schmootz on less capable systems. This was a great test case for the Solo6s. If I could hear into that low-end situation clearly, I could hopefully eq out some of the inevitable mush, while maintaining the resonant frequencies that made up the chord. While the Solo6s obviously didn’t reproduce the same sub content as the Barefoots, the clarity in the low end was stunningly similar. I could really hear into the mud back at my studio, which put a big smile on my face. Next, I tracked a Telecaster over the top of our rhythm section. The openness of the tweeters really spelled out where to place the mic in order to maintain the Tele’s snap while steering clear of the harsher side of the tone. Again, the mix went swiftly, and is translating on laptops, ear-buds and other real-world playback systems. I’ve done a lot more mixing, tracking and listening on the Solo6s, and my impressions have remained consistently positive. Most significantly, the Solo6’s have sped up and helped my mixing. When I can really hear what’s up with the low-end tones, and the stereo placements are accurate, and the reverb tails are obvious, and the top end is wide open, it’s just easier and more fun to mix. Similarly, spotting an issue and finding a solution is easier. I’m thrilled with how changes in mix-bus processing are rendered, especially tonal changes from my trusted hardware units. Most importantly, music I’ve tracked and mixed on these speakers is translating positively on all kinds of systems in the outside world, a clear indication that Focal designed a killer studio monitor with the Solo6 Be. For the money, I don’t know of another speaker with this kind of low-end clarity, and I’d recommend them to anyone in the market for a near field monitor. If you get a chance, definitely check them out! Sub6 Be Hooking up the Sub6 was simple, and getting a grip on how to tune the whole 2.1 system was far easier than I had expected. By plugging the outputs of my monitoring chain into the L-R inputs on the back of the Sub6, and then taking the L-R outputs up to the Solo6s, I was ready to go. On the rear panel are a number of controls that allowed me to make choices about how I wanted the different components in the system to behave. A hi-pass filter affecting the L-R signals being sent to the satellite speakers can be switched between 75Hz, 100Hz or completely bypassed. A lo-pass filter for the Sub6 can be continuously varied between 50Hz and 150Hz, allowing me to dial in how much of the low frequencies I wanted the Sub6 to handle. There is a volume control for the Sub6, a mute switch, as well as a polarity switch and a phase selector that is continuously variable between zero and 180 degrees. Basically, everything needed to tune the components of the system to each other in a way that best suits the room is on the back of the Sub6. The hi- and low-shelf controls on the Solo6s provide further control. There’s also a jack for a remote bypass switch that brings the sub in and out, while simultaneously defeating and reactivating the hi-pass filter to the Solo6s (or whatever satellite speaker you attach to the Sub6) – a very cool feature for A/B-ing. Fortunately my room has a number of bass traps that control and tighten the low-end, so getting the Sub6 phased to the Solo6s in my listening position was relatively unproblematic. I might fear 30Hz in an untreated room! After playing with the hi- and lo-pass filters, I settled in on two settings that I liked. One was with the Solo6s in full range mode, and the Sub6 crossed over at 50Hz, allowing the sub to take over where the Solo6s left off (around 40Hz). The other setting I liked was with the Solo6s crossed over at 75Hz and the Sub6’s lo-pass set around 75Hz. I ended up using the latter setting mostly, finding the bass response in my room to feel more powerful with the Sub6 taking more of the low-end duties. Also, with the Solo6s rolled off at 75Hz, the mid range imaging seemed to open up even further, and a gentle deepening in the depth of field was noticeable. The hi-end sounded unaffected by whether the Sub6 was in use or not. Listening to music with the possibility of feeling 30Hz is always a path of discovery. Some records have little to say below 50Hz or so, while others carry low-end signals I never knew were there. The Sub6 delivered the lowest of lows with the same kind of clarity and punch I raved about in the Solo6s. Again, I could hear a lack of distortion. With bass frequencies that extend deep enough to blow your pant cuffs, there is an inherent lack of definition in some records that blew my mind as well (check out Lenois’ kicks with a subwoofer!). Compared to the Solo6s on their own, the Sub6 left absolutely nothing to the imagination. If there were signals carrying 30Hz, then those were revealed. Of course, I couldn’t help making comparisons between the Focal 2.1 system I had assembled and the Barefoot MM27s. Because the monitoring situations were not the same, I’m not really comparing apples to apples, but I will say that working with the Focal system felt remarkably similar to using the MM27s, but seemed to reach into even deeper frequencies than the Barefoots (who’s low-end response is rated down to 38Hz). The amount of information coming out of both systems across the entire frequency spectrum is remarkable. Comparing the Solo6s on their own to the whole Focal 2.1 system forced me to revisit some of my gushing conclusions about the low-end of the Solo6s. Interestingly, the Sub6 made me appreciate the Solo6s low-end even more. Of course, adding 350 watts and nearly twice the speaker diameter added a ton of power and rumble, freeing up the Solo6s to do a slightly better job with the midrange. However, when you consider the price of the Sub6 ($1450 street), we’ve already leapt into another price bracket entirely, and the Solo6s aren’t playing as heroic of a role as they do on their own. Without the Sub6, the Solo6s bring a level of transparent monitoring to a price point where there’s little competition. At $3450 for the whole system, the range of options changes considerably. With that said, the Sub6 was surprisingly easy to add on to the Solo6, and was naturally married to the Solo6s sonically. Anyone doing sound design for film, or working in a genre that requires constant monitoring of the deepest of bass frequencies, would appreciate the clarity, versatility and ease of the Sub6. Monitor choices are very personal, and it’s important to remember that my working situation, preferences, and experiences with the Barefoots, has led to my obviously glowing conclusions about the Solo6s. Ultimately, it’s a rather subjective topic. I want to return to the ‘different records test’ for a moment and stress that I really do think this kind of listening can tell us a lot about the coloration of a signal by any piece of gear in a monitoring path. I also think listening with other people helps tremendously; you never know what records they’ll decide to play, or what others will point out in a record, or what that will reveal about any set of speakers. I loved what it revealed about the Focals. Allen Farmelo (www.farmelo.com) |
