I have received the speakers.
I'd start a new thread about them, but I really can't figure out which forum to put it in. None of the descriptions make any sense anymore. What is "Values" and what is "Performance"?
Focal Owners Thread
- Thread starter Dr Tone
- Start date
I have received the speakers.
I'd start a new thread about them, but I really can't figure out which forum to put it in. None of the descriptions make any sense anymore. What is "Values" and what is "Performance"?
Art K.
The Voodoo You Do!
I have received the speakers.
I'd start a new thread about them, but I really can't figure out which forum to put it in. None of the descriptions make any sense anymore. What is "Values" and what is "Performance"?
I would put it in "new gear - performance".
Guys, need help
Will get some cheap stuff as dac and amp (fiio d03k and smsl sa60), but i can get Focals way cheaper here than in the US.
Which ones do you think would be best bang for buck?
I am thinking 706 or 906 or 726?
Or should i look for used models?
Found these used: https://www.leboncoin.fr/image_son/1090812953.htm?ca=12_s
Or a whole system: https://www.leboncoin.fr/image_son/1092404359.htm?ca=12_s
What do you guys think?
Cheers
Could get used 836w for 1500E (way out of my budget but figuring I would use those for a loong time).
Will get some cheap stuff as dac and amp (fiio d03k and smsl sa60), but i can get Focals way cheaper here than in the US.
Which ones do you think would be best bang for buck?
I am thinking 706 or 906 or 726?
Or should i look for used models?
Found these used: https://www.leboncoin.fr/image_son/1090812953.htm?ca=12_s
Or a whole system: https://www.leboncoin.fr/image_son/1092404359.htm?ca=12_s
What do you guys think?
Cheers
Could get used 836w for 1500E (way out of my budget but figuring I would use those for a loong time).
Last edited:
Before moving up to the 1008BeIIs, I was very pleased with the Chorus 806V. Would think the earlier 806 would also be a nice speaker.
@Danddd Found quite a lot of good prices in France for them, however I am not that good with assessing how good a used speaker is and trying to learn about that too.
Really want to get very good speakers now so that the following years I will be able to upgrade the other parts (going for China stuff as dac and amp).
Thanks for the feedback!
Really want to get very good speakers now so that the following years I will be able to upgrade the other parts (going for China stuff as dac and amp).
Thanks for the feedback!
SirMarc
New Member
I can get a pretty good deal on a lightly used demo pair of 706's. Would they do ok in a 10x11 room without a sub? I listen to mostly classic rock and 70's Progressive, and will be running them with a reburbished Sansui 9090/Thorens TD145 AT440mla/Schiit Bifrost 4490. Thanks in advance
Marc
Marc
SirMarc
New Member
Nothing guys?
EyeGee
Big Ears
I have a pair of 807Vs that I run with a McIntosh system.
It may be the Mc, but I don't think my set-up does particularly well with rock music. The Focals are much better handling acoustic sounds, rather than hard-driven electric guitars/bass with a lot of distortion.
The other caution I would have about Focal speakers is the tweeters can be a bit brittle. The bass, though, is solid to the point where I don't think a subwoofer is necessary, depending on the room of course.
It may be the Mc, but I don't think my set-up does particularly well with rock music. The Focals are much better handling acoustic sounds, rather than hard-driven electric guitars/bass with a lot of distortion.
The other caution I would have about Focal speakers is the tweeters can be a bit brittle. The bass, though, is solid to the point where I don't think a subwoofer is necessary, depending on the room of course.
SirMarc
New Member
Thank you for the response. I played some of my favorite songs in Redbook and high Res, and was pretty impressed by the mids and highs, but the bass was weak. I'm wondering if the bass would be better in my small room because I can reinforce the bass by having them in the corners. I also have 24" sand filled target stands kicking around that would be better than on top of floor standers at the store.
They told me I have 2 weeks to return them if I don't like them in my room. Maybe I'll pick them up and see. Thanks again
Mark W 2
New Member
I'm a total newbie to the audiophile world looking for some advice. I hope the experts on this forum don't mind me dropping in.
I recently picked up a very clean set of Profil 77 speakers on Craigslist. They sounded great when the seller and I took them for a test drive (he seems to have taken immaculate care of all his audio equipment), and the price seemed quite reasonable ($400 for both). They are going to be a huge improvement on my current setup (a mere Sony boombox on which I play CDs), and my hope is that they'll produce the fuller, richer sound that I remember fondly from growing up in the 1970s. I'm inheriting a large collection of well-kept vinyl.
A friend of mine had some extra equipment that he's kindly giving me for free: a Hafler DH101 preamp, a turntable with a Grado Gold cartridge, and a Crown D60 amplifier. It's about this last piece of equipment that I had a question. The maximal power of the speakers is listed as 125/175 watts (for "long/short program"), with 8 ohms impedance. But the Crown is rated for 35W/channel (into 8 ohms). That makes me think that the amp isn't quite right for the speakers. As I understand it, the Crown would be fine for a little while, but given the size of the room, I'll be tempted to crank up the power, which will lead to clipping and then over time perhaps damaged speakers (from heat? is that right?). The room is about 10 x 20', with 9 foot ceilings, and the speakers necessarily will be placed about nine feet apart, and nine feet from the listening area, and quite far from the amplifier and turntable (call it the full 20', even a little more). I'll be listening mostly to classical and jazz, with some blues and 60s rock.
So my question is this: should I be looking for another amp before even setting up the system? Or could I use the Crown for a while in good health? And if I _should_ be looking for another amp, should I be looking for one that puts out about 125 W RMS power, or perhaps a little more, or should it in fact be rated for significantly _more_ power? I've checked various audio websites, but at this point in my audio education I can't figure out whether the specifications that I have for the speakers are the same as those being discussed (e.g., is the "maximal power" of 125 W for long play for the Profil 77 the same as the "continuous IEC power rating"?). Also, if members of this forum have some specific recommendations for amps that might work best with these particular speakers, that would be fantastic. If I had to describe the kind of sound I'm looking for, I'd probably use words like "analogue" and "warm." Would a tube amplifier be best? The trick is that I'm on a budget, and I'm not yet able to take the plunge for the kind equipment I suspect these speakers fully deserve.
Also, I'll be bi wiring the system, running the cable into two holes already drilled into the living room floor in the 1960s, in which there is still some old speaker wire. I'm assuming that I'll replace the wire—so any recommendations for cable would be grand, too. Is there particular cable that works best with the Profil 77s, or will any good wire do?
Thanks so much!
I recently picked up a very clean set of Profil 77 speakers on Craigslist. They sounded great when the seller and I took them for a test drive (he seems to have taken immaculate care of all his audio equipment), and the price seemed quite reasonable ($400 for both). They are going to be a huge improvement on my current setup (a mere Sony boombox on which I play CDs), and my hope is that they'll produce the fuller, richer sound that I remember fondly from growing up in the 1970s. I'm inheriting a large collection of well-kept vinyl.
A friend of mine had some extra equipment that he's kindly giving me for free: a Hafler DH101 preamp, a turntable with a Grado Gold cartridge, and a Crown D60 amplifier. It's about this last piece of equipment that I had a question. The maximal power of the speakers is listed as 125/175 watts (for "long/short program"), with 8 ohms impedance. But the Crown is rated for 35W/channel (into 8 ohms). That makes me think that the amp isn't quite right for the speakers. As I understand it, the Crown would be fine for a little while, but given the size of the room, I'll be tempted to crank up the power, which will lead to clipping and then over time perhaps damaged speakers (from heat? is that right?). The room is about 10 x 20', with 9 foot ceilings, and the speakers necessarily will be placed about nine feet apart, and nine feet from the listening area, and quite far from the amplifier and turntable (call it the full 20', even a little more). I'll be listening mostly to classical and jazz, with some blues and 60s rock.
So my question is this: should I be looking for another amp before even setting up the system? Or could I use the Crown for a while in good health? And if I _should_ be looking for another amp, should I be looking for one that puts out about 125 W RMS power, or perhaps a little more, or should it in fact be rated for significantly _more_ power? I've checked various audio websites, but at this point in my audio education I can't figure out whether the specifications that I have for the speakers are the same as those being discussed (e.g., is the "maximal power" of 125 W for long play for the Profil 77 the same as the "continuous IEC power rating"?). Also, if members of this forum have some specific recommendations for amps that might work best with these particular speakers, that would be fantastic. If I had to describe the kind of sound I'm looking for, I'd probably use words like "analogue" and "warm." Would a tube amplifier be best? The trick is that I'm on a budget, and I'm not yet able to take the plunge for the kind equipment I suspect these speakers fully deserve.
Also, I'll be bi wiring the system, running the cable into two holes already drilled into the living room floor in the 1960s, in which there is still some old speaker wire. I'm assuming that I'll replace the wire—so any recommendations for cable would be grand, too. Is there particular cable that works best with the Profil 77s, or will any good wire do?
Thanks so much!
KrautNotRice
Well-Known Member
Since nobody else chimed in, I'll give it a crack, albeit a generic answer.
Too little power from the amp is bad for the speakers.
If you keep the volume very low, you might be OK until you get an appropriately sized amp.
Personally I'd shoot for an amp that has more power than what the speakers are rated for. Double would be very nice, so that you have some dynamic headroom. Also, some speakers respond very well to bi-amping. (I'm not at all familiar with Profil 77s)
But, as always, it depends on how difficult your speakers are to drive (sensitivity, Ohms), how loud you like to listen, what kind of music you prefer, your room, etc etc.
Best of luck!
Mark W 2
New Member
Many thanks! In the meantime, I set up the speakers with a system very similar to the one you describe. It sounds fantastic, and I have to admit that having this new audio gear has changed my life—it's indescribably wonderful. Interestingly, the speakers seem to work best with jazz. I'm not sure why that would be, but I get the distinct impression that jazz played on the speakers simply sounds better than classical, which in turn sounds better than rock. Go figure. And so I spend my days with Dave Brubeck. 
KrautNotRice
Well-Known Member
Many thanks! In the meantime, I set up the speakers with a system very similar to the one you describe. It sounds fantastic, and I have to admit that having this new audio gear has changed my life—it's indescribably wonderful. Interestingly, the speakers seem to work best with jazz. I'm not sure why that would be, but I get the distinct impression that jazz played on the speakers simply sounds better than classical, which in turn sounds better than rock. Go figure. And so I spend my days with Dave Brubeck.
That sounds great! My Dave Brubeck cd is one of my favorite cds.
Got any pics of what you ended up with?
Mark W 2
New Member
Absolutely! The speakers are at one end of the living room, facing the couch, about six feet apart:
There's a quilted wall hanging just to the right of where I'm standing, and there's also a large carpet and lots of soft furniture.
The system is on the other side of the room, in an adjacent den, in a hidden closet. The closet is hard to see. It's just to the right of the hanging carpet:
The cable leading into closet on the lower-left goes to an extra set of bookshelf speakers in the den, facing the living room, parallel to the channels on the Profil 77 speakers.
And this is the set-up, which I appreciate will seem like a super beginner's system to the readers of this thread—but I'm loving it, and I'm looking forward to sweetening it over the years:
You can see on the upper-right that I've lifted the shelf up a few inches to make room for the turntable cover, and I've installed some touch lights beneath that shelf and beneath the shelf below, just to the left of the tape deck. The lights come in real handy, and they cast a nice, intimate glow over the system in the evening. I got that old tape deck for $1 at a garage sale, I cleaned it up a bit, and it works reasonably well—nothing special, but then again, it cost a dollar (now I have to get the hundreds of tapes I have in the basement; a number of them were made on metal cassettes in the early 1980s, and they sound just as clear as they did back then). Someone gave me a Bose system radio receiver/CD player. The CD player doesn't particularly work (it skips), but the receiver picks up my stations well. I've set up an antennae running up the left inside of the closet to give it a boost. That's definitely a placeholder in the system.
I picked up the LPs for a song at a local record store, most for a dollar each. A friend gave me those nice, solid wooden boxes to hold them, and there are a few more boxes in the waiting for when I expand (there are many linear feet of LPs waiting to be shipped or driven here). The speaker cable enters a hole I drilled in the floor just to the right of the lower-right corner of the Dave Brubeck album. It then threads through the crawl space and enters the living room behind the radiator cover in the first picture. You can see the speaker cable more clearly here:
Here's a view of the closet from a little father back:
So, a really basic system, but it hasn't cost much at all, the speakers are terrific, it was really fun to set up, and it's given me some of the most pleasurable, relaxing, satisfying times I can recall.
Mark W 2
New Member
Thanks so much! I really appreciate that. The room was my summer job two years ago. I stripped and scraped through many layers of paint down to the original wood paneling to reveal all the details before repainting (it turned out that the center panels were just particle board). My pinky finger still triggers and aches now and then from all the rotary sanding, but it was worth it. Among other things, I found a large wall cabinet hidden beneath all the paint, right above the mantle! It must have been sealed for at least seventy years. Those silver sconces also had been painted black. And I found some drill holes in the floor where I found old stereo wire, which started giving me ideas ...
Among other things, I found a large wall cabinet hidden beneath all the paint, right above the mantle! It must have been sealed for at least seventy years. Those silver sconces also had been painted black. And I found some drill holes in the floor where I found old stereo wire, which started giving me ideas ...
KrautNotRice
Well-Known Member
Looks lovely! I bet it sounds great.
KDAC
Addicted Member
Mark W 2: Having heard Focals before, I know they sound great, but what has me in awe is the wall color, hardwood floors, and the open-shelved space your components are sitting in. The room looks downright comfortable without being ostentatious and I can't help but guess that the rugs on the walls have been repurposed to absorb reflections. Excellent looking space with undoubtedly excellent sound playback.
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