Description
Atmospheric surround effects for your Aria system
I’m a big fan of the series Better Call Saul, and one reason is the producers’ attention to detail with the soundtrack. The mix of primary and ambient sounds changes from scene to scene, but always feels spot on. Like other high-performance surround speakers, Focal’s Aria SR 900 rarely draws attention to itself while creating a seamless sonic bubble that keeps you riveted to the onscreen action.
The SR 900 is a bipole design, with dual woofers and tweeters firing in different directions to spread sound far and wide. The drivers share the acoustic characteristics of the other speakers in Focal’s Aria lineup.
Cone material combines old and new
Speaker makers continuously search for new and better materials for drivers. An ideal driver material has three qualities:
- lightweight, so it can accelerate quickly
- rigid, so that it moves like a piston, without bending
- well-damped, so that unwanted vibrations don’t color the sound
In their pursuit of sonic excellence, Focal made a surprising discovery — right in their own backyard. Woven flax can form the core of a very rigid yet lightweight speaker cone. Some of the world’s finest flax grows in fields near Focal’s headquarters.
Focal creates this unique cone by sandwiching a layer of hollow flax fibers between two thin layers of fiberglass. The Aria SR 900’s dual 5″ woofers are made of this composite.
Inverted dome tweeter looks different, sounds terrific
The Aria SR 900 also features two of Focal’s 1″ aluminum/magnesium inverted dome tweeters. Inverting the dome brings more of its surface area closer to the voice coil. That means the voice coil can be smaller and lower in mass. Focal has found that this reduced mass allows the dome to move faster than a conventional dome, for better high-frequency response.
And the tweeter’s lightweight Poron “memory foam” suspension improves damping, which reduces distortion in the critical 2-3kHz range by a factor of three, compared to a typical suspension.
Built in-house for better quality and value
The speaker drivers in every Aria speaker are built in-house at Focal’s facilities in Saint-Etienne, France. Why is that important? Because it gives Focal complete control over every aspect of design, manufacture, and quality control, resulting in a consistently superior, high-value speaker.
