Naim & Focal Take The Laurels With a £350,000 Stereo At The Festival Of Sound
In which Adam Rayner gets to experience an entirely new level of reference stereo….
I have been an audio reviewer for a very long time. So long, that if I were to deny the reality of presbycusis or the rolling off of high frequencies’ sensitivity in the human ear as we age, I would be a liar. When in my teens and 20s, my hearing was quite bizarrely sensitive. On holiday in Dorset, I could see bats flitting around, quite unlike at home in Wembley. Here’s the crazy thing, I swear upon my mother’s profane soul (she was a sweary Old Bag Extraordinaire) that I could hear the squeak of the bat, at least as it started, before it soared into ultrasound for echolocation. And my chum that kept on fixing my JBL T595 Decade 6×9 loudspeakers’ mids and tweets, only got the job because his hearing went all the way to 21,000Hz!
And then there was the time, when working for Acoustic Energy loudspeakers as their production manager, when I had to test every single tweeter, every single midbass and every single passive crossover by hand or rather by ear. I had one passive crossover that sounded a little muffled on one side. As these were an expensive sub assembly, hand soldered by one person at our suppliers Micropride, we were loathe to simply ‘bin’ one. I called Phil Jones the designer man and had him listen. At first he could not tell what I meant. Then he could and he measured the crossover network, only to find a resistor in one place was 0.18 Ohm off spec. He marvelled that I could tell and told me I should be reviewer.
I have always used earplugs in badass cars, never been ashamed to ram my fingers in my own ears in the crazy car systems because I always knew about hearing damage. Every single time your ears ring after a loud concert, it is damage. I have written terrifyingly paternal warnings any time I have ever reviewed a bullet tweeter for use in a car for example.
Finally, I spent my entire youth covering up the tips of my ears because they are as pointed as a pixies’ pair. I have this in common with mammals that need to hear high-frequency location, like cats and mice both alike, one to eat and one to survive. Oh yes and one other thing, don’t take my word for this because it is too bloody weird, but Barn owls, yes owls… have hearing openings on the side of their heads, which the entire plumage of their faces direct sound waves into that are lopsided on said heads to better enhance their ability to precisely locate mice. And my ear openings are lopsided by a centimetre or more. I cannot wear glasses straight across my face without bending them. It puzzled my optician!
This means that even though beginning to age, these pointy ears are connected to a pair of cochleas whose basilar membranes have not been beaten to papier-mâché and I am equipped with better high frequency detail collectors in my pointy pinnae and better positional location abilities than most because of my lopsided bonce!
So I can tell like hell and I have also been given the privilege of hearing many sound systems of astonishing cost, to be able to compare them with each other. Admittedly mostly in multiple channel but many astonishing stereo systems from studio control rooms, to the high end rooms at the CES, to the best the UK has to offer. Check out to the story of Steinway here. https://www.adamrayner.net/ultimate-audio-experience/ Up until then the most awesome I had experienced.
The Festival of Sound
Last year I attended show called the Indulgence Show and have run their press releases since 2015. I went on the Friday – it ran until Sunday night. Now the day I was there, it was so quiet in terms of public attendees, that I could not even film in some places because it looked like the Marie Celeste. I had imagined more people went in the next two days but when the same show in the same place the next year has a completely different name and branding, you kind of know the organisers admitted they got their concept wrong. And fair play to them, they must have sat down and said ‘what is this all about?’ Well, the core was the music. The fact that the top hi-fi brands could sell systems of such incredible cost had blinded them, calling it ‘indulgent’. But to potential buyers of high-end hi-fi, it is not an indulgence, but rather feeding a hunger so deep in their soul, that they will spend that kind of money to feed it. People that are happy with bleeping Bluetooth piffle-boxes will never understand hi-fi. Musicians will. Realising this, and with a new and deeply insightful grasp of the UK hi-fi psyche, they sprinkled real actual musicians and music upon the show like the pine nuts in a posh pizzeria.
I arrived at one of Novotel’s flagship locations in Hammersmith, literally over the road from where the Hammersmith Clarendon Pub used to stand. I roadied there, with dB Hire P.A. who’s boss became that speaker maker Acoustic Energy. and rescued me from the music business by hiring me as production manager 30 years ago. Five years even earlier and it was 999, The Barracudas and Actifed. It was punk, it was the Eighties and it was bonkers. And now, a seeming life time later and I had been invited as a member of the press, specifically to go and listen to £350,000 worth of stereo hi-fi.
Regular readers of my stuff, may know of my dealings with Focal in the past. With Home Cinema Choice magazine, I reviewed surround sound systems, at least six from Focal, going from petite and affordable all the way up to the kind were I would have to go to where they were, because my house was too small. I recall one Focal 5.2ch system, in a posh hi-fi studio in Henley upon Thames, that had two mighty subwoofers. I have seen astonishing magnets on very big bass transducers but I had never seen a subwoofer that used an electromagnet instead of a normal motor structure before. Furthermore, the intensity of the magnetic force acting upon the coil on the back of the subwoofer cone could be adjusted! Yep, electro-magnetic subwoofers with grip-greatenisers!
Then on the automotive side, a really quite long time ago, I was sent a set of Focal car speakers. Or rather some components that added up to a set. Two lovely posh midranges, two very expensive looking passive crossovers, and two little wooden boxes. In each box was a certificate, or rather the printout from the analysis of the tweeter within. Priced at a mere seven hundred quid each, the diaphragms were made inverted and from a material called Beryllium. These are incredible.
Focal’s biggest baddest domestic home speaker, a mighty tower of boxes, also used the same kind of tweeter and was called the Grande Utopia Be, for Beryllium. All through my hi-fi manufacturing and then my hi-fi reviewing career, I would go to hi-fi shows that had incredible systems. Focal were always there. But only one of these speakers would be stood in a public area, to astonish and amaze. Never two and never connected to a system.
Until this weekend.
Best of all, this behemothic, brobdignaggian loudspeaker is in a brand new iteration, with ever yet more advantage taken of new materials and engineering possibilities. Yes, those crazy electromagnetic subwoofers are now just a part of this awesome four-way system, with a small box on an expensive looking cable, behind each speaker, to adjust the gauss in the woofer transducer’s voice coil gap! These have EM as their new suffix. Their performance envelope is capacious, with the bass extension declared as -3dB at 18Hz, from a 16in driver, with further twin 6.5 inch drivers above and below a new version of that legendary tweeter. It is a 27mm IAL2 pure Beryllium dome, still inverted. Above that is a multiferrite 11inch midbass driver. The whole assembly weighs forty-one stone and is about six feet six inches tall.
And there are two of them.
The amplification was a pair of Naim Statement NAP S1 monoblocks, with Naim NAC S1 Statement preamp between them. The preamp formed the centre part of a truly major black-finned marvel. The statement made by Statement, would appear to be dismissive because this brutally gorgeous lumpen block of kit, with its essential brethren, chases the God Logarithm and feeds him until he is utterly satiated. Each of these mono blocks has an RMS rating of 746 watts. The chap who told me, had ‘only’ been with the company for ten months but had been in hi-fi for thirty years and yet didn’t get the joke. Because 746 W in electrical terms, is one horsepower. It is a crazy understatement to say the amp is power rated at ONE….. horsepower.
Acoustic Horsepower amused Acoustic Energy’s Phil Jones I do recall. It was why he named the company that. And it clearly entertained the design team of Statement. The main deal is, these speakers were getting an easy 1.5 kW dynamic to suck upon as they wished, with merely half that declared as the RMS per channel of these black finned geomorphological phenomena.
Interestingly enough, there was just one high-quality speaker cable going to each array. Not bi-wired, not tri-wired, not even a fat one. But it did look posh.
Next along in the row of hard-core equipment, was the Naim Fraim. An equipment rack of extreme solidity and further fettled by use of ordnance supports involving a ball bearing rather than a pin. The top unit was their new streaming product. Naim do have merely expensive ones but this is the brand-new flagship called MD555 and costs thousands. Below that a box called Core, a CD ripper and storage unit that can feed the MD555.
The bottom two units are separate power supplies for the MD555. It comes with just one, on the end of a serious looking cable. This keeps electromagnetic waves away from sensitive digital circuitry in the MD555. However, if you wish to upgrade to Naim’s ultimate performance, you get another power supply box. When you connect that, the first one only then deals with digital circuitry and the second one only with the analogue. This is taking ‘discrete’ as in ‘separate’ to a whole new level. This whole system could never be described as a discreet.
The loudspeakers were standing upon isolators. I commented that I would love the lifestyle that meant I would be buying a set of isolators that damn huge. The space in the hotel was large, divided by drapes and as well as plenty of other loudspeakers’ stood about to passively absorb stray energy in the full irony of acting as damping devices, there was a mediumly-large absorptive ‘thing’ in each corner of the demo area for this system, as well as chairs in rows.
I was able to make some horribly hurried but professional resolution video with the JVC 4k rig in between two demonstrations. One was a smaller system that still sounded incredible from sideways-on in the next demo area, then it was this one and I sat down at the front and was regaled with a bunch of recordings.
So what does £350,000 sound like?
The Experience
First, do be assured that it is possible to get true high fidelity reproduction from smaller systems. The real increase with the huge equipment we see here, (as physics never takes a holiday and logarithms are involved as described) is what we call scale. Not loudness but rather the sheer size of the feeling it gives you.
On this scale, it makes you feel a little minor, perhaps almost a child-size, as the sound of the beautiful lady singing was just so large. Perhaps it was just my wonder at how I could hear her soul in the slight rasp of the pain in her voice, rendering me child-like.
The reason that the mighty Focal purchased Naim, was clear. This is like a formula one race team finding an engine fit for their level of refinement. In this case, it needs limitless headroom and utterly HUGE signal to noise ratio. A nasty quartet of words with no emotion. Yet the absurd, huge and quite NEVER-experienced-before size of that ratio, with a recording of such utter live virtuosity, added up to an emotional melting.
The scale and size and might are all things you can see and flinging fancy adjectives about is to be expected but the literal, actual BRITISH meaning of awe, not “yeah, awesome” as youth might say, but real actual ASMR response, or goosebumps, was not in the power and might. No, it was in the space, the sheer physical enormity of the space it took up in your mind. When a small speaker “belies its size” and “plays quite beyond the boundaries of its box” to make a quality sound stage we are impressed. Now, try to imagine that effect scaled up to THAT big. It is quite overwhelming. Yet the silence is what amazes you. Like utter, true black on a TV screen (recently finally achieved, by the way) the holy grail for sound is found in the the silences in between.
When she sings, it is from a nothing, yet you are close enough to kiss her…..
I wanted to stay and ask for MY track but the traffic was building on a Friday in London town and I had to go. Yet as I rolled away in my Volvo, I realised that my warranty was now over and maybe, just maybe I might think about the rest of the suit to go with the Beryllium buttons I already have…
A massive thanks to the Focal and Naim folks PR (known as the Surrey Vikings’ agency to me) for the invitation and a huge thanks to the erudite and utterly brilliant staff of Naim I met at the show. Every single one was just a ball of keen youthful talent and enthusiasm. I applaud who ever does the hiring, as your staff are awesome. And erm, I have met and harassed all sorts of folks in the business down the many years. There IS such a thing as corporate personality and it is shaped by HR.
So would I spend £350,000 on a two speaker stereo system? You know, were I outrageously wealthy, I might just.
It’s a meaningless question when you are not the wealth level needed to even consider it. But this I will say, if you are keen on quality audio, then read a lot of reviews and justify me and mine’s careers! But most of all, look for a product that allows you an upgrade path, as even at this level, you can use one or two PSU’s on your streamer.
I have a new reference experience now.
VERDICT
Focal Grande Utopia EM with NAIM Statement and MD555 front end
Price £350,000 approximately
HIGHS: Absolute perfection, scale, space, soundstage and realism. Beautiful to behold, let alone feel.
LOWS: Only for the very few.
Performance: 5
Design: 5
Features: 5
Overall: 5