[Focal Utopia headphones...with Beryllium driver]

15 minutes ago, Fitz said:

Thank you for your expression of love to your neighbor.

Please see this : 

 

[Focal Utopia headphones...with Beryllium driver]

1 hour ago, morphsci said:

Not really. I do not care about opinions. Opinions based on subjective preferences are not helpful in life.

I grant the case that a subjective preference might align with objective quality/value but that occurs infrequently. Your subjective preference for the Utopia headphones does not mean that they represent an objective standard in sound quality. Bless you if you like Utopias, and enjoy listening to music with them, but accept that they are flawed and thus they do not represent the peak of quality of reproduction of sound.

To Hell with opinions, they have killed music and art in general. 

[Focal Utopia headphones...with Beryllium driver]

On 7/30/2020 at 2:49 PM, catscratch said:

I also made the jump from the Clear to the Utopia.

The Utopia is a little leaner and colder, has a few db less bass and a bit more treble but is still roughly within the boundaries of neutral. It is noticeably more resolving than the Clear, has a bigger stage especially when it comes to height and depth, and in the treble there is more 6khz peak but less 11khz peak. The microdynamics are also better on the Utopia, the Clear felt like it compressed things a little bit (though it had terrific slam) while the Utopia is more nuanced. I do think the Clear is better balanced and a bit better in terms of tone, but the Utopia is noticeably more resolving. At the end of the day, a fair price for the Utopia would have been around $2k and for the Clear around 1k, at least in terms of sound quality, so they're both quite overpriced to my ears but the Utopia does perform technically better overall.

I will probably get rid of mine soon, though. It's fatiguing (the Clear was too) and I tend not to listen to it very much because of that. Granted, I haven't done any serious component swapping to try and find the perfect synergy, but I'd rather find a headphone I enjoy with no caveats and build on that. Well, I have one, it's called the HD650, but I want to find something that resolves at the flagship levels while having similar qualities. The Focals are close... but no cigar.

I'm not sure what to replace it with though. The Audezes have the wrong FR and unit to unit variation, and I don't really feel like playing roulette with $4k headphones. The Raals are intriguing, but I've heard fatigue is an issue too. The Stax SR-007 just doesn't fit my head properly. The SR-009 very much has the wrong tuning. Hifimans... yeah... no. So I'm kinda stuck.

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students of history know, Utopia never really works out!

.Audio-Technica ADX5000. They are tonally more accurate than Utopias, they also do not have problems with treble; and frequencies are balanced - all this at half the price for Utopias. These ATs are better than Utopias for music which is not ghetto type music [Rap, Hip Hop, Bass and Drums and similar - about 20% of music market]. People who listen to ghetto type music do not care about tonal accuracy or frequency balance.