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When Focal announced the Elear in 2016, I was on the hype train immediately. A company known for incredible driver design, built off its own research and IP entering the Flagship headphone arena for the first time? It’s incredibly rare (once every 10-15 years, if that) and intriguing.
I saw Jude’s interview with Nicolas and the hype train hit Mach 1. The Elear wasn’t made by an OEM contracted by Focal, it was made by their team in Saint-Étienne, built from the ground up to exacting standards at every level of production. I saw Jude’s measurements... this looks like a super 650... Mach 3. I bought a pair right away. Those were the longest 40 hours of burn-in I’ve done since my first HD800. Put them on, hit play, and... Mach 0. The bass was too strong for me, the mid presence was too weak for me, the FR reminded me of the early 650 when it had a veil and bass distortion. The clarity, transient response, and soundstage was on another level, so the driver technology delivered on everything it promised, but the FR just wasn’t for me.
This spring, discussions around Focal picked up on Massdrop. We started seeing polls asking for Elears and Utopias. The community started to voice their feelings on both within our platform, and the overall sentiment matched closely with my own experience. Folks didn’t like the bass, folks wanted a little more mids (though there was much debate on this, very easy to have too much in the upper midrange), the driver tech was great, but the FR needed to change. Beyond that, the discussions dove into physical characteristics of the headphone. The Elear is heavy, add a thick, rubberized, 4m cable to that (this was on release, it’s been revised down to ~3m since) and you’re hanging a 100g weight from your 450g headphone with the rubberized material catching on everything for those microphonics we all love.
With a detailed community mandate in-hand, we approached Focal this spring, suggesting we work together on a refinement of the Elear, utilizing elements of the Clear to reach these goals:
1. Reduce the bass response to a tasteful ~3 db above neutral 2. Bring up the midrange presence so it’s in line with the rest of the frequency range 3. Change the cable to be lighter and 6ft long 4. Remove the rubberized coating on the cable 5. Simplify the aesthetic with a black on black on gunmetal colorway
Focal was receptive to our proposal and over the next 8 months we worked to achieve these goals. To reduce the bass response and bring up the midrange, we changed the earpads to a similar style as the Clear while tweaking the damping scheme.
We dropped the long rubber cable and replaced it with two cloth covered cables. One is terminated with a 4-pin XLR, one is terminated with a 1/4”, both are 6ft long.
We changed the colorway from the black + silver combination to a black on black with the cable providing a little contrast with black on gunmetal.
Across all our headphone collaborations, I feel we’ve executed the community mandate most completely in the Elex. This is the Massdrop flagship open headphone collaboration.
None of this would be possible without your interest, your discussions, your insights, and your support. Thank you for your continued interest in our collaborations and community designed products.
This drop is limited to 1000 units, all serialized, the first 500 purchases are guaranteed a serial number under 550.
Was any tuning done specifically for this? Other than bringing bass down, so mids are relatively higher?
I'd love to ship everywhere we normally do, but this is a restriction from Focal.
All that said, there are freight forwarding services you can engage yourself. I don't have any to recommend, but I'd guess the cost is reasonable as a percentage of $800.
You sound like you really enjoy Skullcandy and beats products?
But I do like dancing, which for some songs needs bass, and that make most open back cans neutrally no fun at all. This was not the case with the original Elear.
While ear pads play a massive part in shaping the frequency response of a headphone, they do little to change things like transient response, driver dynamics, sound stage presentation, sensations of attack or decay, etc. These are things that relate more directly to the performance of the driver, and a $2000 headphone driver should always stand out in these areas compared to a $200 headphone driver.
The really tricky area is when ear pads change the measurements for some of those things. Does it change the actual performance of the driver? Generally no. Is it possible for them to cause a change in the way measurements look? Absolutely. This is where some inconsistencies between measured performance and subjective performance tend to reveal themselves.
As always, YMMV, but there's some context for you : )
"can you guys come up with a solution to the shipping limitations? "
If I post an official solution, or even a recommended forwarder, every international Focal distributor is gonna be calling them up, showing them screenshots of how "Massdrop is actively circumventing distribution agreements".
At which point, it will be on Focal to decide if they want to risk being sued by the distributor, losing that business and dealing with potential litigation, or if they want to keep making the Elex with us.
There are many forwarding services with solid reviews, wish I could give you more advice than that.
BLUE = measured average frequency response (of many samples) RED = target frequency response [B&K 1974] GREEN = correction https://picload.org/view/ddawrora/focal_elear-before.png.html https://picload.org/view/ddawrorl/focal_elear-correction.png.html
Otherwise, it is an aesthetically very appealing mod! :)
The sonarworks graph in your link shows a 9db drop between the bass and mids. Also, the sonarworks graph is the only one I've seen that shows such an abrubt rolloff in the sub-bass for the elear. Every other site shows the sub-bass extends much flatter (which matches my impression when I heard it).
The curves in the drop discussion shows a 10db+ mid drop and I've seen graphs online that show close to a 15db drop for the Elear. It's this midrange suckout that accentuates the bass heavy sound of the Elear.
The frequency curves I've seen for the elex show that Focal/MD reduced the bass (still above neutral) and may have done some work to reduce the mid suckout. This should result in a decent improvement and a more neutral headphone... which matches what people that have heard it are reporting (eg., a mini-clear or a more resolving/faster HD600).
For myself, I'd love to hear these next to the Clear. I auditioned the Clear against the Elear a few weeks ago and it was everything I could to to not drop the $1200 and take them out of the store... they were that good.
-------edit-------- For sake of comparison, my daily driver headphones are ZMF Eikon (closed, work); modded HD650 (living room); HD600 & HE4xx (home office).