Thomas of Thomas & Stereo, who has owned six or seven pairs of Focals, describes the difference between the ordinary tweeter in his old 836V and the beryllium one in his 1028 with a picture. The ordinary tweeter "sounds like marbles," while the beryllium one feels "like powdery sand." Focal's big idea is its tweeter. Most tweeters are a small dome that bulges outward. Focal turns the dome inside out, a shape it has used since 1981, and bonds the coil that drives it directly to the dome, so more of the energy becomes sound instead of being lost as heat at the edge. Its best tweeters are made of beryllium, a metal that is very light and stiff. James Larson of Audioholics measured the Sopra N°1 and found "a terrifically neutral response on and off-axis," and Andrew Robinson calls the Diablo Utopia's midrange "crazy clear" and "a direct line to the recording." Focal suits listeners who want every detail without working for it.

Jeff Dorgay of TONE calls the Kanta a perfect place to begin building a system and says "you'll have to spend six figures before you outgrow the Kantas." The Kanta N°2 uses a beryllium tweeter that Dorgay hears as "a touch warmer than the Sopra tweeter," and he ran a pair in a small room from a 40-watt Naim Uniti Atom. The Sopra N°2 and both Kanta towers are efficient but dip to a low impedance, so Audio Advice recommends an amplifier that is comfortable driving 4 ohms. Don't skimp on power either. The Diablo Utopia manual, quoted by Hans Wetzel of SoundStage! Ultra, warns that a tweeter is damaged by an amplifier with too little power, not too much. Set the speakers and your seat in an equilateral triangle. Larson found the Sopra N°1 most neutral slightly off axis, so you don't need to aim them straight at you, and Robert Deutsch of Stereophile preferred his Kanta N°2s with the grilles off.

Jacques Mahul was an engineer and technology journalist when he founded Focal-JMlab in Paris in 1979 as a research office for acoustics, and he made his first drivers in a workshop at his father's precision mechanics company in Saint-Étienne. Focal was the driver brand and JMlab the speaker brand, and his first speaker, the DB13, was a bookshelf model with the bass of a bigger box. Focal says the Grande Utopia of the mid-1990s established it among audiophiles, and the beryllium tweeter followed in 2002. Doug Schneider of SoundStage! credits Focal with setting off the current interest in the metal, which Yamaha had first used in 1974. Wetzel counts Focal among the very few high-end companies that design and make their own drivers, and the plate on the back of his Diablo Utopia named the technician who checked it before it left the factory. Deutsch reported that all of Focal's high-end speakers are built in its plant in Saint-Étienne, and Wetzel says the cabinets come from Focal's own woodshop in Bourbon-Lancy.