I’ve been using these for a while now, about a month. They really are great headphones, but I would wait for a significant price drop.
There are some sticking points that I feel most people overlook, so I’ll point them out here:
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Raising the price for non-American consumers is unacceptable to me, you are in France. If they want to raise the cost of their own goods they should pay that full cost, it’s not a political thing, it’s simply economics. If a product costs more in the UK due to VAT or similar do they pass that cost onto US consumers? I doubt it.
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BT 5.2 APTX should sound pretty similar in theory, but they should know that on any device that has a microphone it instantly sucks when the bandwidth is split in half on calls. It also makes multipoint more glitchy than a more reasonable BT 5.3 and results in very average battery life.
Focal you can improve your call quality and wireless end-to-end latency simply by using APTX adaptive. APTX can’t adjust bandwidth so it lags instead of adjusting bitrate accordingly.
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Some incoherence in the bass, separation, layering, and texture lacking. It more than makes up for this in mids/highs
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LAG in all videos and music even wired. Here’s an example: I put it on DAC mode and press play on tidal, I can’t hear the beginning of the song. In youtube videos it lags as well, don’t even think about gaming. I have a lot of headphones, this isn’t an issue with any of them through usb-c or 3.5mm. Tried phone and PC, the files are downloaded for minimum buffer time and set to the lowest bit rate it’s still a problem.
Watching a music video Kenya Grace - Strangers - JWhite Drum Cover in 1080p is jarring, all the drum beats are off. Feels like over 70 ms lag in usb-c/3.5mm. I downloaded the music, same issue. This needs improvement, you have access to low latency LC3 codecs on BT 5.2 and it is Royalty Free. The slow audio processing on top of the slow codec makes that lag even worse. And seeing videos out of sync even when I’m wired up feelsbadman. Anyways, audio reviewers don’t ever talk about latency but people do care if it’s not synched up! It feels cheap, the reason people like airpods is the seemless nature of their product, ‘it just works’. This is the overall experience beyond build and sound quality, latency is a reminder that you are dealing with common high tech bugs and issues more than you are listening to the headphones.
I hope you can update your firmware to improve it with LC3, people will buy LC3 transmitters if they care.
SQ Comparisons:
Let’s pretend this isn’t wireless for a moment. Personally it’s a 8.5/10 closed back (bass issues). The radiance is a 6.5/10 (dark and boomy, closed in). OG clear 8/10 without EQ (Radio voice sound metallic timbre). Azurys/Hadenys 7-7.5/10 (Upper mids shouty). The E3 9/10, still the best closed back I’ve heard but if the bass decay was slower and it was toned down in the upper ranges I think it could scale better at mid volume. AMT is a double edged sword that way, I enjoy some subtle bass resonance in a closed back, sometimes I enjoy distortion from tubes too, which isn’t great on planar.
To Focal:
Focal, the more you minimize reminders that you are using wireless headphones, the more people will use them as their daily driver. Reducing price, reducing dac latency, using BT 5.4, and a more understated visual design (no holes, trypophobia!) would pave the way to mass adoption because they are so good already. It’s a bit too conspicuous to wear in public otherwise. Capture that market that wants to blow all their money on a solid headphone they can use for everything and you’ll be rolling in it.
Wireless headphone users aren’t looking for a collection, they want that all in 1 that they can take outside. Every person who wears your headphones on transit is a free advertisement to 50+ people, every day. Wireless headphone users are purchasing the idea of freedom, they want to feel like they aren’t wearing headphones at all.