It took the Focal R&D team three years to come up with a range of loudspeakers to fill the gap between the Electra and the Utopia series. That’s six to eight engineers full time; a costly pursuit, one that only companies with Focal’s scale can afford. The result certainly looks like it was worth the effort, it’s a refreshing speaker that’s big on innovation, looks and driver technology. Focal hasn’t done anything radical, rather they looked at the Electra and Utopia, used proven solutions, did a lot of research, improved and listened over and over. Sopra was kept secret until the Munich High End show this year and by July the first samples were available in the Netherlands. But demand was so high that I had to visit a well equipped dealer for an extended private listening session in order to make this assessment. I heard the floor standing Sopra N°2, the only other speaker in the range thus far is the Sopra N°1 bookshelf.

This impressive loudspeaker with its Utopia style bend looked small in the huge listening room, until that is I stood next to it and realised that 1190mm is bigger than average. Maybe it’s for the best that we didn’t try to get them to my 3^rd floor apartment, even without packing material they weigh 55 kilos each. The drivers look familiar on the outside, a ‘W’ cone is used for both the 7inch woofers and the 6.5inch midrange, the beryllium tweeter is already well known. The beauty and improvements are to be found inside the box behind the drivers. The midrange now uses a Tuned Mass Damper, this consists of ridges on the suspension that damp unwanted resonances and make cone and surround movement more linear. Focal borrowed this idea from racing car suspensions and earthquake protection for skyscrapers. You can’t see the improved magnet system inside the drivers, but the Neutral Inductance Circuit (NIC) is a sort of Faraday ring that ensures that neither the position of the voice coil, the current inside the coil nor the signal frequency influence the magnetic field. The result is claimed to be lower distortion, more detail and improved dynamic behaviour. The two woofers look rather simple compared to the midrange, however they make use of NIC technology too.

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