From another site – yes, Focal products are designed for precision at moderate volumes. See the official response below this post (pasted below):
— Quote —
Dear snellemin,
We have read your Elear review and we are sorry that these headphones don’t give you entire satisfaction.
However, the issue described is actually not a quality issue.
Indeed, we have made a clear design choice on Elear and Utopia. Our headphones have been designed to favor the respect of the dynamic contained within the audio signal versus dynamic compression that would offer a higher SPL capability but less respect of the original audio signal. To cut a long story short, the choice was audio quality oriented rahter than SPL oriented. This allows our products to work with full performances until the mechanical clipping is activated. This means that you jump directly from a very low distortion to a sound which could be heard as rattling / cracking noise. On very special tracks with only very low frequencies at very high level, you can thus hear some noises - as you will do on classic loudspeakers.If we change your pair of Elear headphones, the new one will be designed similarly and it will also have a kind of cracking sound when you will be listening to music with high volume and a fair amount of bass.
The only solution we can recommend you is therefore to listen to your headphones at a lower volume to avoid the cracking sound.
Thank you for your understanding,
Best regards,
Marine, Community Manager Focal
FocalOfficial, Feb 20, 2017