Focal Bathys schwarz

For fashionable folk with pots of money.

Focal is one of the largest audio brands in the world today, with over 40 years of experience. The French brand is most popular for its speakers and car audio systems, with in-house developed speaker drivers that have been used in flagship audio setups that cost more than most houses do. It took a while for the company to enter the personal audio space with headphones, the Focal Spirit Professional closed-back studio set was released in 2014 and then another closed-back set in the form of the Listen Professional in 2016. However those were quickly overshadowed by the launch of the Focal Utopia—an open-back set using the world's smallest speaker drivers and pure beryllium diaphragms, to where the Head-fi community was never the same again. I will have more to talk about the Utopia in a separate article, although the subject of today's review has more to share with the wireless version of the Listen Professional. Dubbed simply the Listen Wireless, Focal's first foray into Bluetooth headphones had the same mediocre impact as its very first headphones. Would the new iteration mimic the Utopia's success? Today we take a look at the brand new Focal Bathys Bluetooth ANC headphones to find out.