First Looks: Focal XS 2.1 – Audio Par Excellence

First Looks: Focal XS 2.1 – Audio Par Excellence

Above And Beyond

To a majority of consumers, the name Focal or its official name, Focal-JMLab, does not ring any bells. This is because Focal is better known for its high-end audio equipment, such as floor-standing loudspeakers and professional studio monitors. A little research shows that the company has been making speakers since 1979 in central France, and is apparently among the top three brands in Europe, and among the top ten in the world. The Focal XS 2.1 multimedia speaker system is their first foray into the lower end of the market.

Made To Match

With their brushed aluminium construction and black accents, each one of the Focal XS 2.1’s satellites looks exactly like the Apple iMac all-in-one desktop PC. It’s not surprising therefore that Focal markets this system as “Made for Mac”. In fact, one of the satellites has a built-in iPod dock, and comes with all the adapters that you’d need to fit different generations of the iPod on it. Since it has a dock, it logically has a USB connection, right? What makes the Focal XS 2.1 unique is that the same USB port is also used as the audio port. In doing so, the speaker system bypasses your PC’s sound card and runs the audio signal through its own proprietary digital-to-analog converter (DAC).

Audio Performance

Given the pedigree and price of the Focal XS 2.1, our expectations were set pretty high. Thankfully, the system did not disappoint. Going through a playlist of lossless audio files ranging from classical to hip-hop and rock, the Focal XS 2.1 reproduced very distinct highs and lows without sounding muddy or tinny. In some of the rock songs, however, we noticed that the mids didn’t stand out as much as they should.

Movie sound was also excellent. The deep bass produced by the 70W RMS subwoofer greatly enhanced the cinematic drama of our 1080p version of Inception. If you didn’t know any better you’d think the sound was coming from a 5.1-channel speaker system. The real star of the show however is Focal’s DAC, which made even 192kbps audio files sound almost lossless. Even audio from YouTube sounded amazing!

Final Thoughts

Given that Focal has been making high-end speakers for over thirty years, it is not surprising to find out that the XS 2.1 sounds great with lossless audio files. What is surprising is the fact that its DAC is so good that it even makes lower quality files sound better. Focal even adds the extra convenience of the built-in iPod dock. The only problems we have with it is that one, it takes up one USB port (a small problem) and two, it costs PhP 32,000 (a big problem).

For a multimedia speaker set, that is an astronomical figure, but for an incredible-sounding, world-class home audio/cinema system, it’s just about right. We feel therefore that Focal may have overshot the mark with the Focal XS 2.1. It may be marketed as a simple multimedia speaker set, but we believe that this kind of system belongs more in the living room rather than on your desktop.