Focal Stellia Review: Purity Headphones worth $ 3,000
The stellia focus is $ 3,000 headphones, and I’m worried they might destroy me for life. I usually won’t consider myself an audiophile but, like the most dangerous addiction, just taking a sample of good items to make you good and truly addicted. Even though it’s an expensive rabbit hole to find yourself down, Stellia has at least a surprising level of flexibility to help you use your big investment.
Stellia aesthetics is not for shyness and retirement. The combination of Cognac and Mocha skin, stainless steel, and aluminum – complete with perforated designs that resemble bubbles – means they stand out even when you don’t listen to them.
Focal does not make cheap headphones, and Stellia is an example. At $ 2,990 they were legally placed in the audiophile area, a kind of luxe-luxe that made max airpods and SONY WH-1000XM4 look pedestrians. Even so, Stellia is actually not the most expensive focal headphone; The crown went to Utopia $ 3.990.
However, what stellia, is a headphone covered with a company meeting. Where one set utopia relies on, in part, in the room around you for a spacious Stillstage, your Stellia Cocoon in your music. There is no active noise cancellation, only ancient physical obstacles that are good for the background of the Rubbub space around you. Similarly, there are fewer opportunities for what you listen to hear.
It opens the door to take the stellia with you, and indeed the focal has designed a headphone like that. Honestly, the idea of dropping a $ 3K cane set in my backpack when I headed to the airport filled me with an unreasonable terror, but by leaving them behind you really lost.
The key is low impedance. You can assume it as the amount of power needed to move your headphones: lower, and amplification in the smartphone and other mainstream electronics is enough to encourage it. Higher impedance, meanwhile, requires higher power.
At 35 ohms, Stellia was suddenly unexpected in taste for a set of reference headphones. This means that, while you can enter it to the amp headphone – I use a very good arche focal but since then – with a 10-foot balanced XLR cable included, you can also revoke it and exchange 4 feet cable that is not balanced with a standard 3.5mm jack on finally.
It can open directly to the headphone port on your mobile, should still have one, or in my case to lightning to a 3.5mm dongle for my iPhone 12 Pro Max. The two sets of cables are wrapped in cloth, which can produce some microphites for rubbing themselves and your clothes. There is no in-line microphone, which is a pain when dealing with incoming calls, but I discuss that by not answering the phone.
My antisocial properties are only part of the motivation there; More significantly, I don’t want to stop listening. Fed with uncompressed tidal tracks, Stellia quickly arouses my uncertainty about how a headphone set can justify the premium price label like that.
I admit, my first hope is for a different sound profile: something that is not wrong again, which immediately says “This is why you spend three thousand on this special headphone.” Instead it’s the absence of coloring that you realize is a star, here. There is purity and transparency to the stellia that comes out of the path of the recording itself: Focal tuning seems more like a magnifying lens, withdrawing details that might be passed by other headphones.
There is one single 40mm beryllium speaker driver in each ear cup, its own focal design and a promising 5Hz-40KHz frequency response, SPL 106 DB sensitivity, and 0.1 percent THD on 1kHz. The result is a large precision stack, and a soundboard that feels more like sitting in front of a top-class speaker set.
Clear vocals and piping, as if you share a recording booth with your chosen artist. Somehow, however, Stellia isn’t l