Focal Diva Utopia Active Speakers

New Focal ‘Diva Utopia’ active speaker details live on Forbes. £30,000. Class AB main amps inside and UWB connection between speakers (I guess this is the same tech as the Sonus Faber Duetto). Hard to tell what the outside is made of, I thought it might be the brushed concrete style of those Tin Classic Anniversary Sopras but it appears to be carpet tile material?

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I’m not normally a great fan of Focal design, but these look pretty interesting. The felt material is certainly different.

Probably not the ideal material if you have cats though…

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What a beauty !!

Not so hot for jammy little hands either…………

ATB, J

From this , maybe they are coming out w new utopia series ? :thinking:

Who make the onboard amps, that’s the question!

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They are wireless and naim make the amps. I was hoping for an xlr connection from a 332.

The loudspeaker also contains Naim electronics, including 400W of Class AB powered amplification and a new streaming architecture handling up to 348kHz / 32-bit audio

From Forbes magazine.

Is it true, Naim inside amps? We will see. But interesting if it’s the case.

From the article:

Focal Utopia design cues can be found at the heart of the speakers, such as the red and black double grille on the tweeter and the brushed aluminum ribbon encircling it, forming a symbolic Yin & Yang motif that evokes the harmony between expertise and technology. The distinct design even extends to the felt material chosen for the side panels, a material with minimal environmental impact.

Basically one saves alot going active with this pair , if it’s naim been the power source , what about the sales of other naim products ?:sweat_smile::thinking:

Its a Focal speaker but Naim had input into the electronics and amplification (as you might well expect), and it should fit nicely into the Naim and Focal network and app.

I haven’t heard it but I did see one on my last trip to Naim - the “felt” composite panels were particularly interesting.

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The blurb seems to say that the streaming architecture is also Naim. It’s a really interesting development.

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Should be an ideal companion for an Atom HE…

It looks like the streamer is already on board.

I was a hopeless angler many years ago. Couldn’t get the fish to rise to the bait.

Looks like nothing has changed!

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Hopeless speller too!

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Always have been.

Teacher once asked why I always got twenty out of twenty in each weeks spelling test & was useless for the rest of the time.

I replied that because I couldn’t spell I actual had to learn the spellings. All the others could guess & get seventeen/eighteen. I would have been fortunate to reach double figures.

Hi @Cicklo @HungryHalibut

Yes, this has the latest gen of Naim streaming platform in it, a lot of DSP work + my little pet, UWB :slight_smile:

So UWB. Not all UWB is born equal and this one is quite special.

We started the journey on UWB back in 2019 when a startup Spark Microsystems ( https://www.sparkmicro.com/ ) came to my attention. Their application for the tech was more for gaming, but I had other plans and was inspired from reviewing lots of wireless techs that made a lot of promises, but fundamentally failed to deliver when measured. We’ve spent many years of research and implementation in this area to make it work like a wire.

The default Spark platform in theory is lossless (ish), but can only synchronize based on sample resolution. It typically wander around 60us and the synchronization is done stuffing and dropping audio samples. Not pretty.

The Naim solution is a somewhat better.

  • High precision “wall clocks” run in master and slave speakers that work down in the 100ns zone.

  • fractional PPM hardware control of audio clocks to skew master and slave speaker clocks exactly into sync. All via protocols so audio clocks live near the DAC while the UWB card lives at the top of the product and its all driven from clock references so the UWB is clock slave, not master… but the UWB contrtoller IC steers the master clocks based via a protocol that goes to the DSP.

  • Jitter is within measurement uncertainty the same as the wired link option.

  • The RF front end is highly optimized. We’ve pushed every fraction of a dB out of the solution as UWB is a very low energy technology so it needs precision engineering to make it work nicely and needs a lot of time down the RF lab to get it right.

End result - the wireless speaker that is measurably as good as the wired variant. Plus a lot of time down labs measuring RF performance.

It maybe expensive, but this is quite a heavy duty piece of kit. Plus yes, it’s a genuine Naim class AB amp solution in it in full active configuration. But hey, lets talk UWB :slight_smile:

Best wishes

Steve Harris
Software Director
Naim Audio Ltd.

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Very interesting- thanks for posting Steve :+1:

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Thanks Steve. Not being techy I had to look up UWB. Is it ultra wideband, or something else? I have no idea what it may do though!