Focal Sopra N°3
Floorstanding Speakers

GENEROUS AND CONTROLLED BASS

The longest standing loudspeaker of the line, Sopra N°3 perfectly combines dynamics, space optimisation and harmonic richness.

With its two 8¼" (21cm) woofers, this loudspeaker offers solid, rich and perfectly defined bass for music lovers looking for optimum performance. Despite its reasonable size, it will reveal its full potential in rooms measuring up to 860 ft2 (80 m2).

Sopra clearly inaugurates a new era for the “Premium High End” by taking into account new performance criteria. Compact, modern, a pure design, character... all these are essential factors to ensure perfect integration into your interior.

Equipped with best midrange drivers ever developed by Focal, with the NIC and TMD technologies, Sopra pushes back the limits of sound reproduction in terms of transparency in a very compact enclosure. Indeed, unlike Utopia, which is extravagant by essence and where size is by no means a constraint, Sopra aims for maximal compactness to ensure easy integration into reasonably sized rooms.

TUNED MASS DAMPER

The Focal teams have revealed resonances which alter definition in the suspension which connects the cone to the basket. The solutions already known for increasing the damping properties of the suspension all result in an increase of the mass which consequently alters definition. The answer came from a technology used in earthquake-resistant skyscrapers and which is also used for the suspension on racing cars. "TMD" technology consists of optimising the suspension profile which controls the resonance in order to drastically reduce distortion and increase the definition of bass and midrange.

MASTERING THE CABINET AND CHOICE OF MATERIALS

Made in France Sopra’s cabinet was designed in Focal's cabinet-making facility in Bourbon-Lancy (Burgundy, France) using the same manufacturing process as for Utopia The 69mm sandwich-machined front panel uses the same principle as ‘Gamma Structure’ to provide inertia and damping. Its density gives it the inertia necessary to provide a stable mechanical reference for optimal definition. The inside of the cabinet has no parallel side panels, and small Helmholtz resonators have been added to the lower section to prevent vertical standing waves. We chose glass as the material for the base of the loudspeaker to provide floor coupling, using spikes, which enabled the fastest propagation time possible, thus eliminating all halo effects in the bass.