Focal Professional is a French company that manufactures three lines of monitors that fall in different price categories: The high end SM 11, the mid line SM 6, and their quality yet more affordable CMS line.

Focal Professional has two factories in France with over 200 employees. One factory manufactures the cabinets and the other manufactures over 200,000 drivers a year.

It is refreshing to see a company that manufactures products in their country and doesn’t send all their product to Southeast Asia.

The Focal Twin 6 Be’s along with the smaller Solo 6 and Sub 6 are part of the SM6 line.

This line is categorized as a reference analog series that was created for studios in search of monitors that reveal all information in the audio spectrum without a noticeable masking effect.

Focal has incorporated interesting designs in their monitors that make them rather unique. The first being their inverted dome tweeter.

With the positive dome only joined at its edge, the inverted dome allows it to be inactive beyond 16 kHz for a flexible surface. Its design also allows the response curve to be more linear.

Tweeters over the years have been made from many different materials. They were first made of small paper cones like the midrange drivers and woofers. They then started to make them out of silk and thinly coating them with polymer.

Aluminum is another material used for tweeters that has an atomic number 13 with a mass chart of 26.98. Titanium which is also used is number 21 with a mass chart of 47.86.

Why the chemistry lesson you ask? Well, Beryllium’s number is 4 with an atomic mass is 9.01. What this means is that if you make a tweeter dome out of beryllium at the same thickness as an aluminum dome, it’s going to be three times lighter in weight.

That means less harmonic distortion since there is less inertia. The downsides of working with Beryllium are its expense and toxicity.

However, Beryllium is only dangerous if inhaled so the Beryllium in the tweeters is safe unless they are torn or otherwise damaged. Focal put nice protective cover on the tweeters when shipped.

Focal uses BASH technology for the amplification. This technology is a patented high efficiency power amplifier circuit that takes the best of Class D and Class AB and created a new class of its own.

The BASH amplifier has its load directly connect to a power amplifier. This creates an advantage in both linear frequency’s response and EMI performance. Their “W” cone design uses polyglass cones for the woofers.

What they do is apply molten glass microballs on cellulose pulp cones. This process Focal claims is an excellent paper damping with glass rigidity that they claim exceeds a single skin of Kevlar and is almost ten times superior to one of polypropylene.

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