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The French audio company Focal has a well-deserved reputation for producing some of the finest and most expensive headphones in the world. TechHive has verified the veracity of that reputation in its reviews of the Clear ($1,490), Elegia (discontinued), Radiance ($1,290), and Stellia ($2,990).
Not one to rest on its laurels, Focal strives for ongoing improvement in its products. Today, the company announces that it is replacing the Clear model with the Clear Mg, which sells for the same price of $1,490. I didn’t have the opportunity to hear the original Clear, but the new Clear Mg offers stunningly beautiful sound that truly lives up to its name.
Review: Focal Arche Amplifier Transforms Over-Ear Headphones Into High-Fidelity Sound Machines SPY 1/27/2021 John Scott Lewinski
When the music industry transformed itself from an analog to a digital environment, it was simply responding to the demands of an ongoing global technological evolution. LPs gave way to CDs. Walkmans bowed out to iPods. MP3s emerged as the easiest way to preserve and send music via the internet. Songs and albums became easier to produce and share around the planet. Even if the music industry was sometimes slow to adapt, the digital revolution is all but complete now.
The problem is digitizing music means compressing it, and compressing music means stripping out portions of a given song’s audio elements. To combat those effects, the world’s top consumer audio technology companies put a lot of work into enhancing and recovering the lost sound to sweeten digital music as much as possible.
Focal Arche headphone DAC and amplifier
It’s been less than 10 years since Focal entered the headphone market, but in that short time, the company has established itself as one of the preeminent makers of ultra-high-fidelity cans. TechHive has reviewed four models so far the Clear, Elegia, Radiance, and Stellia and all were judged to be excellent, though they will set you back quite a pretty penny.
To round out its headphone-related portfolio, Focal recently introduced the Arche DAC/headphone amp. Does it occupy the same rarefied heights of performance as the company’s cans? Is it a match for the glorious Stellia (which I had on hand for this review)? The answer is a resounding