This is one of those reviews that almost didn’t happen. Three or four issues back, I was just wrapping up a the writing of a test of the excellent Chorus 705V speakers from French speaker manufacturer Focal when the company announced it was scrapping that range and launching an all-new Chorus 700 line-up.

The idea, it explained, was to move away from the rather complex and ‘designery’ 700V models – the ‘V’ suffix indicated the use of glass fibre in the speaker cones (V for ‘verre’) and was echoed in the styling, and even the speaker grilles stood out from the cabinet to form a ‘V’ shape.

What was needed, Focal MD Gérard Chrétien explained, was ‘a design for the post-crisis market’. Sounds dramatic, but what Chrétien was alluding to was that styling on the old 700V series: he explains that the design was ‘ideal for the time when customers were looking for statement products’, but now ‘there has been a shift to more classic design – design with longevity in mind’.

For a company making some of the most dramatic-looking speakers currently on sale – for example the Utopia series, with its separate enclosures looking like the speaker has been slashed through and then curved into shape – that’s a radical change.

To date, Focal speakers have always looked very distinctive, yet here we have a range of speakers, from the entry-level model right through to large floorstanding versions, with an almost conventional appearance. The Chorus 705 we have here, being the simplest design in the range, makes that point well: it’s a very simple ‘two drivers in a box’ design.

Anyway, having spiked that original review – which was very complimentary, by the way, should you happen to find a retailer with a pair of the old 705Vs in stock at a knockdown price – all I could do was wait for the new models to arrive, hoping they’d be as good as those they replace.

Announced at the CES 2013 show in January, the new speakers are now in the shops, so it seemed most logical to start where I’d left off, so to speak; and so, after a few final tweaks to the design before production started, a pair of factory-fresh Chorus 705 speakers were delivered a month or so back. And very elegant they are too: for all of Chrétien’s suggestions of harsh economic realities, these are no poverty-specification speakers, as one might hope given the price, which is just under £400 a pair in the standard walnut or rosewood finish.

As already mentioned, the Chorus 705s are the entry-point for a seven-strong range extending all the way up to the £1198/pr Chorus 726 floorstanding speakers, a three-way design with twin bass drivers, and taking in a centre-channel and surround speakers for home cinema use along the way. All the speakers come in those standard finishes, with ‘Style Black’ (combining high gloss and leather-textured surfaces) available at a premium: it’s £60 extra on the Chorus 705s, for example.

All the speakers are made by Focal in its French factories, as are the drive units, at a time when so many other famous names have outsourced production in the quest for cost-savings.

That should really come as no surprise. Focal has built up its not inconsiderable business by investing heavily in research, development and manufacturing, not only making its speakers but also producing most of the components for them in-house.

As well as its hi-fi speaker range, from the Chorus 705 right up to the massive Grande Utopia EM, it makes desktop audio systems, headphones, in-car speakers and amplifiers and pro-use monitoring systems; and alongside conventional drive units it has in-house technologies including Beryllium tweeters and driver cones made from sandwiches of Polyglass and foam. Those last are the company’s ‘W-cone’ drivers – two layers of glass means double-V, and of course ‘double-V’ in French is ‘W’.

While the little 705s may be normal-looking, they too have very Focal innovation built-in: the 13cm mid/bass unit is one of the company’s Polyglass drivers, in which the cellulose surface is covered with minute hollow glass spheres, while the 25mm tweeter is an all-new aluminium/magnesium inverted dome design Focal calls TNV2.

It’s mounted in a suspension system using Poron microcellular urethane, used to ensure linearity and a flatter frequency response up to 30kHz without break-up, and assembled using the surface tension of the adhesive employed, to minimise the amount required and thus the weight. As Focal puts it, ‘the masses in high frequency units are so low that every extra microgram of adhesive is critical to performance’.

That’s typical of the kind of attention to detail the company brings to its products – and the kind of flexibility in-house production allows.

The voice coil is also kept small to the same end. The tweeter is fitted to the metal structure wrapped over the top of the cabinet and carrying the Focal logo, so even what looks like a design element actually serves a real purpose.

The cabinet is built from 18mm and 24mm MDF with structural bracing, with non-parallel internal walls to break up resonances. The crossover is an in-house OPC design (its simplicity aided by the in-house driver manufacture), the front venting port is an aerodynamic design for less distortion, and even the grille cloth has been redesigned for better integration.

Performance
As I mentioned before, I was rather taken with the old Chorus 705V speakers, and the new arrival proved no disappointment. Thanks to that front port, the 705 is designed to be flexible about positioning – Focal even supplies wall mounts and suggests the speakers could be used for the rear channels in a larger Chorus 700 surround system – and while the manual cautions against using the speakers too close to room boundaries, I found they could be used hard against a wall with very little deleterious effect, save some slight bloom in the bass.

That aside, the old equilateral triangle set-up works well, with the speakers on some rigid, heavy stands – I’m still using a pair of ancient sand-filled Atacamas – and slightly toed-in towards the listening position. Neither is there any faffing around with ‘to biwire or not to biwire’: the speakers have just a single set of terminals.

All of that done – and with the speakers on the end of a range of systems from my usual Naim Supernait to the Naim DAC-V1/NAP 100 reviewed last month and an all-Marantz set-up using a CD-63 MkII KI-Signature and MusicLink preamp and monoblocs – it was time to enjoy the fast, well-extended and highly informative sound of the Chorus 705s.

Any worries I had about how they would shape up against the old 705V speakers were swiftly dispelled: the new model may be even more open and revealing than the model it replaces but it accomplishes this without ever becoming ‘edgy’ or over-bright, thanks in no small part to its well-developed yet tightly controlled low-end.

Focal suggests these speakers are suitable for rooms up to 15 square metres, and are ‘the basis of a formidable system with a subwoofer’, but even in my room, which is just beyond the upper end of that suggested usage, I felt no need for some low‑end assistance, other than when playing the usual suspects such as organ music or those 1812 cannon.

Even then the 705s delivered a sound with exceptional weight and impact for boxes so small – they stand just 31.5cm tall – and, while there was a bit of ‘lost in translation’ about the Focal website’s original description of them as ‘Compact but nervous’ (it’s since been changed!), I heard no signs of trepidation. Instead the 705s always sound assured, confident and, given a suitably accomplished amplifier, entirely in control of the music.

There’s no shortage of similarly sized ‘bookshelf’ speakers on the market, many of them selling for less than the Focals; however, on this showing, the Chorus 705s are worth every penny of their price and bode well for the rest of the company’s entry-level range.

Design Notes – Gérard Chrétien (MD, Focal-JMlab)

Having started his career with French hi-fi magazine L’Audiophile, Gérard Chrétien (above) has been with Focal-JMlab for almost 23 years, and now divides his time between setting the course of the company’s product ranges and running its marketing operations.

His early exposure to music was via the sounds of Tamla Motown, but he soon discovered ‘the sensuality of sound’ of classical music, counting among his earliest favourites Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, conducted by Solti.

These days, he says, ‘Saint Saens, Fauré, Ravel and Satie match my feelings, but it would take many lives to immerse myself in all the music I would like to’. However, he admits the constant reinvention of jazz makes it his favourite genre.

For tuning the company's products, ‘I like to have some acoustic reference, so I will start with piano –usually jazz –, but for soundstage and dynamics  nothing matches classical music, he says, citing Saint Saens’s Third Symphony (Orchestre de l'Opéra Bastille/Myung-Whun Chung) as an oft-used favourite.

He says that the key point of Focal’s design and development of speakers is that ‘We design and build a drive unit for each loudspeaker, not for ranges. We believe in “garbage in garbage” out and design our drive units to require only simple crossovers - these keep optimum phase response and sound better.

‘We want an acoustic guitar to sound like an acoustic guitar – not somebody strumming on a few strings stretched across a fruit box.'

Focal Chorus 705 Specification
Type Two-way bookshelf/standmount speaker

Price £398/pr

Drive units 13cm Polyglass mid/bass, 25mm TNV2 tweeter

Frequency response (+/-3dB) 65Hz-28kHz

Sensitivity 89dB/W/m

Nominal impedance 8 ohms (min 3 ohms)

Recommended amplifier power 25-100W

Finishes Walnut/Rosewood (Style Black at £60 premium)

Dimensions (HxWxD) 31.5x19x22.7cm

Original review from July 2013 issue of Gramophone