Thursday, January 18, 2018

The focal elar review

Special thank you to Starpickers for loaning the Elear for me for a couple days of use, despite having a sales boost campaign coming up and needing the Elear showcase.

Sponsored link below, do give them the support as they are enthusiasts with a small scale shop working their way up

http://www.lelong.com.my/merchant/StarsPicker.htm

With that out of the way, here is a brief though of me and the Elear. Do note that I only had a couple days with them, so the things here stated are *non conclusive*.


Setup: Aune S6 Optical - XLR based Elear
Song tracks: Stranger Tide OST by Hans Zimmer

An Overall outlook

Well, since this has an urgency of time, I didnt have exactly all the time i needed to test it out with every genre, and hence picked the most orchestral mix and vocal powered tracks from Stranger Tide.

My first impressions are that the soundstage is quite wide, giving a fully immersive experience to the music. Like for the mermaids song, there is really a creepy sensation to it, and when the suspense comes, I can imagine the movie scene in my head, where mermaids were rampaging all over the pirates with anger. The suspense made my heart go pounding mad.

On the near end of that track, I was anticipating Blackbeard's ship appearance, and by the all mighty queue of the music through Elear, I was like, HIS HERE!! You can feel the authority in bass that makes the impression of an almighty ship coming to wreck havoc. Oh yeah, blast them sonofabitches, my mind went thinking of the scene again..

So, with Hans Zimmer's magic trick, I can say that Elear can really show how capable are good tracks carving scenes in your mind. Elear has the bass depth and small sparkly tingling treble spikes that makes the music feel "entertaining and immersive".

Caveats

There are still some issues need to be addressed, though the audio department is really nice. First of all, like them users rant, the cables are unusually freakingly LOOOOOOOOOOONG. I could forsee a lot of people having to dime out and get another shorter cable just for the sake of having a shorter one. 

Second of all is the squeaking sound of the headbands, Yes, the headband squeaks if twisted slightly both ways. Dont know how people fix that, but there are remedies to it.

Now the weight of the headphone is quite subjective. It is not as heavy as the LCDs, BUT they are also not as light as the HD650 i own. So where does the weight be at? I think it's all good for home desk use without fatigue, but it is not quite the street friendly type.


Conclusiion

SO with a good audio quality but a *meh* design quirks, is the headphone purchase worthy? If you can live with the problems, then by all means go for it, it's quite worth the price. For me and my wallet, I would, if there is a used pair with warranty still, even better.