Focal Sopra No.3 Loudspeaker

Focal’s elegant, striking, and strikingly different Sopra No.2 has quickly established a reputation as the sweet spot in the entire Focal range. Offering the right size, at the right price, with more than a hint of what makes the Utopias look and sound so special, it has just enough bass, is easy to accommodate and easy to drive: it offers that perfect blend of virtues in a speaker that sounds instantly impressive, goes the distance, and stands well apart from the crowd. If that doesn’t tick all the boxes then someone has been adding extra boxes I haven’t noticed. Judging from sales and the almost universal acclaim the speaker has received, no one else has noticed those boxes either.

So what are we to make of the Sopra No.3? Launched at Munich earlier this year it had the assembled press scratching their collective heads: 100mm taller, 50mm wider and another 50mm deeper might not sound like much – indeed, unless you stand the two speakers side by side, in a big space it can be hard to tell them apart – but it makes for a substantially larger and more physically as well as visually imposing speaker once you get it into a domestic environment. That’s fine if what you are getting is more, much more of what makes the No.2 so special, but a quick glance at the numbers and that’s when the confusion starts. All that extra volume and the use of 210mm as opposed to 180mm drivers doesn’t seem to have delivered an awful lot. Basic speaker theory dictates a three-way linkage between the size of the cabinet, the system bandwidth, and its efficiency: increase one and you impact the others, so in theory the No.3’s increase in cabinet volume and acoustic power should translate into greater efficiency, increased bandwidth, or both. Instead, the bigger box, bigger drivers, 25% increase in weight, and bigger price-tag deliver one paltry extra Hertz of bandwidth and a whole half a decibel of sensitivity. Notice how I slipped the P-word in there? That’s what really had us all confused: the No.3 seemed to undermine all the practical and domestic benefits of the No.2 while hiking the price from £10,500 to a whopping £15,750 – a 50% increase that doesn’t just break but shatters the critical £10K price barrier. Somehow, somewhere, those numbers – 1Hz, 0.5dB, £5,250 – just don’t add up and in commercial terms one has to wonder what Focal were about? On the face of it, either whoever came up with the concept got it wrong or the sales and marketing team should have said something, either the performance or (being one’s normal, cynical self) the figures should have been massaged – unless of course Focal knew (or knows) something we do not.

All in all, this was just too intriguing a conundrum to pass up. Here’s a speaker that looks outwardly identical to its smaller brother, employs the same mid and treble drivers, uses similar innovative high-frequency loading, and implements the same technological advances to improve the linearity and out of band performance on the bass and mid drivers. Having reviewed, really liked, and subsequently lived with the Sopra No.2, the temptation to put the No.3 alongside its smaller, more affordable brother and figure out just what on earth is going on was too tempting to resist – not least because Focal weren’t just willing but positively enthusiastic at the prospect.

It’s not until you actually get hands on with the Sopra No.3 that you really appreciate just how much bigger and heavier it is than its little brother. Awkward to handle with all those shiny, curved surfaces you’d think that it would also be awkward to set up, but here’s the first surprise – once you’ve got the beast roughly in place, aligning it for the best performance is actually significantly easier than for the No.2, a function of the bass voicing which is cleaner, clearer, and more articulate, allowing you to hear just what’s going on that much more easily and achieve better balance and integration as a result. There’s less of a weight against clarity/speed trade off at play here than there is with the smaller speaker, while the most critical parameter is rake angle, a function of the extra height. Fortunately, one thing the 2 and 3 have in common is their substantial spikes, which are readily hand adjusted from above, making attitudinal adjustments quick, simple, and effective.

Once you start listening, it soon becomes obvious that, in practice the sonic and musical differences between Focal’s Sopra No.3 and the smaller No.2 are just as apparent as the physical ones. Just as the No.2 has enough bass to satisfy, not so much as to get it into trouble, so it is with detail and dynamics. But as balanced a performer as the No.2 demonstrably is, the bigger model easily betters it in terms of scale, presence, dynamics, and detail – something it achieves despite using those identical drivers for the midrange and treble. The bigger speaker’s musical presentation is bolder and capable of more dramatic musical shifts – but also possesses greater subtlety, separation, texture, and brings more individual character to voices and instruments, a function of its far more sophisticated harmonic development. With the No.3, it’s not about the quantity of bass, but its quality and how that affects the rest of the musical range, bringing impact and transparency that extends up through the critical mid-bass and that opens up and fills out the mid-band. That’s down to the amount of air moved by its bigger bass drivers and the ease with which they do it. The real difference between these speakers rests in the realm of dynamics and the way the 3 lets performers and performances breathe, bringing additional texture, expressive range, and energy to proceedings. The result is a bigger, more dimensional acoustic, more solidity to images, and more dynamic impact and contrast. If the true measure of a successful audio system or component is its ability to sound like people, then the No.3 sounds much more like real people, in the room with you, than its little brother – and the bigger the room, the bigger the difference. Although the No.3 works really well in moderate spaces that you might think would cramp its style – further evidence of the quality and control it offers at low-frequencies – there’s no ignoring the way its performance expands once you give it some elbow room.

How big is that difference and perhaps more critically, how much is it worth? Like the answers to most questions in audio, the answer to this one is, “It depends…” What it depends on is which way your system and speaker purchase is looking – up or down? Or to put it another way, are you buying a speaker to finish a system or one to grow with a system that’s still a work in progress? The real beauty of the No.2 lies in just how much it delivers from even relatively modest electronics. In that context, the No.3 is better, but not superior enough to make sense of or justify the £5K difference in price. But, start cranking up the quality of the electronics and the gulf between the two speakers starts to open and ultimately to yawn as the No.3’s performance grows to fill the room with energy and a living, breathing musical presence. If you already have serious amplification, or you’re looking to upgrade while keeping the same speakers, then the case for the Sopra No.3 becomes compelling.

Let’s start putting a few more meaningful (and familiar) numbers on this, numbers that relate to the rest of the Focal range and even stable-mate, Naim. The commercial imperative to demonstrate and sell the partner brands alongside each other was always going to lead to a period of uncomfortable transition while the two ranges sized each other up, the sonic marriage resembling two porcupines mating. In many ways the Sopra range represents (along with the DR series of Classic Naim amps) the meeting point between the two brands. If you own anything up to a NAP-252DR or NAP-300DR, the No.2 will offer a perfect match, just as it does with lesser Naim amps. But the Utopias are a rather spikier proposition. As demanding of space as they are of set up and partnering electronics, Naim has struggled to provide effective partners for the flagship speakers, both in philosophical and performance terms – at least until the introduction of Statement and latterly, the DR series power amps.

Which is what makes the contrast between the Sopra No.2 and No.3 so interesting. If the No.2 is a speaker that looks like a Utopia but works in real-world rooms and with real-world (particularly Naim) systems, the No.3 is the speaker that reaches upwards towards the flagship range, offering much of its quality (musically and aesthetically) at a far more approachable price in a much less demanding package. The wonderful but hyper critical Scala Utopia V2 weighs in well the wrong side of £20K – and demands considerably more space and application than the No.3. The biggest Sopra might not represent the same astonishing balance of virtues as the No.2 – or be quite the bargain that the No.2 most definitely is – but its ability to dig deeper into the recording, to get closer to the original event and bring that performance to life makes it significantly more impressive and engaging than its smaller brother, once you hang it on the end of a high-end system. I used it with both ARC and Berning amplifiers and never managed to outrun its capabilities. While the traditional, performance related numbers on the spec sheet might not explain this, perhaps the less obvious ones do. Run the dimensions and you come up with a 30% increase in cabinet size over the No.2: size clearly matters – just not in the way you necessarily supposed. 

As somebody (sadly, not Einstein) once said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Which is another way of saying that, when it comes to audio equipment, the numbers really are only a tiny (and often misleading or irrelevant) part of the picture. One inescapable conclusion is that, as far as music is concerned, our brain and our ears are far more capable than any measuring device we’ve ever made and that, when it comes to Focal’s Sopras, the numbers don’t even begin to hint at the scale or the nature of the musical differences between these models. I could point out that the extra cabinet volume and larger drivers bring gains not in bandwidth but in dynamic response and discrimination, harmonic development and texture – with all the musical benefits that go with them. I could suggest that whereas the Sopra No.2 represents Electra-Plus, the No.3 is much more Utopia-Lite. I could certainly observe that the No.3 finally (and very successfully) fills the gap in Focal’s range, a price and performance stepping-stone to the Utopia line.

Alternately, I could simply conclude that the Sopra No.3 is one darned fine speaker that easily justifies its elevated price and simply leave it at that. Focal’s brave decision to put the numbers out there, front and centre, certainly invites us to place this speaker in the context of the rest of the range – as well as provoking lively debate. Having spent time with the Sopra No.3 it’s easier to understand why they did so with such confidence. Listen to it and you quickly realise that this is one loudspeaker with nothing to prove and everything to say.

Technical Specifications

• Type: Three-way reflex loaded loudspeaker
• Driver Complement: 1× 27mm tweeter, 1× 165mm midrange, 2× 210mm woofers
• Bandwidth: 33Hz – 40kHz ±3dB
• Sensitivity: 91.5dB
• Impedance: 8 Ohms (3.1 Ohms minimum)
• Dimensions: 402 × 1264 × 595mm
• Weight: 70kg ea.
• Price: £15,750 per pair

Manufacturer: Focal

URL: www.focal.com

Tel: +44 (0) 8456 602 680

http://Back to reviews