I'm Otto Jørgensen, I work at Dynaudio Academy, and I was involved in developing the new Focus from Day One. The new Focus is a series of wireless, active speakers where we combine the studio-grade performance of our legendary drivers, easy-to-use, very advanced streaming – we use the best platform for streaming in the world. The new Focus is basically designed for anyone, who wants that high level of performance but not necessarily all the hassle of a full, traditional hi-fi system. So the new Focus is a system that's easy to set up, easy to start to use. And once it's set up and running, you just simply connect to it and start playing your music. You can use just as easy as any wireless system, but you get the performance, that you'd expect from a Dynaudio speaker. The new Focus is build with versatility in mind, so you can basically use whatever source you have. Whether you prefer steaming, a CD player, or if you have a vinyl collection, you can connect a record player, and again have that very high level of performance, whether or not it's an analogue or digital source. We really took care of the signal path to make sure that we have the absolute best performance. No matter what the source is. In 2014, we made the Focus XD, which basically set a gold-standard for active speakers, and included some wireless technology as well. So, with the new Focus, we took that to a completely new level. Much improved driver technologies, much better amplifiers. But we also build in a completely new streaming platform, which allows you to do a lot more things. So, what the customers expect to do today is basically to pick up your streaming app – from whatever app, you prefer to use – and just be able to select the speaker inside the app and play to it. With the Focus XD that we put to market in 2014, we focused a lot on the performance of an active loudspeaker. It has some wireless technology built-in, but it was all about how great sound, could we put into the speaker. So with the new Focus we're really putting a lot of emphasis on the usability of it. I think all these different types of streaming and how to take music from a phone, or whatever app you're using, to a loudspeaker… that has become commonplace today. So this is something everyone can do, with all types of speakers. But it's not very common to do that, and get the actual performance of what it was like to listen that music in the studio. This is what I really think the new Focus can do. So it takes that quality of performance – the way we would like people to hear the music – and puts that into a package, that everyone can use. And it's very simple to use in your everyday life. The active system allows us to utilise the maximum performance of the drivers in a way that's quite unique to the active systems, and combines that with simple ways of using it that has a lot of advantages to it. In passive speaker systems, you have some flexibility in what components you connect to it, and you can keep updating and fiddling with different things, different updates. 'How can I improve my sound a little bit?' In the active speaker systems, we're kind of stepping away from that a little bit, and making a system that's more complete as a whole. It's a closed system; that closedness also allows us to do a lot of things, that you couldn't do in a passive speaker, in terms of how we utilise the drivers, and how we work with the cabinet to improve sound. In the new Focus, all of the speaker models have a closed cabinet. The way that acoustically works with the drivers means that with the DSP and the amplifier we can extend the bass performance, so we get lower frequencies out of the cabinet compared to what you would do in a traditional passive speaker with a port in it. So there's a lot of things we can do with the closed-box systems. That opens up possibilities: for example, when you're not playing loud – which you're not doing all the time in most cases – you'll get a lower frequency output because we can utilise the excursion of the woofers to play lower frequencies, even though you're not playing that loud. Once you turn the volume up, the DSP has circuits and protection circuits, what we call a 'sliding high pass', which basically will protect your drivers so you don't damage your drivers, no matter how loud you're playing. We built in studio-grade amplifiers from Pascal, based in Copenhagen. It's a Danish company that designs amplifiers specifically for studio-grade use, and some of it has seen its way into traditional hi-fi systems. And now, we took these amplifiers and built them into the speakers. That allows us to do a lot things because of the very high performance they have. Pascal amplifiers have a very high peak output, up to a 1000W peak, combined with very low distortion, and also good power supply, good cooling capacity. We can run the speakers very hot for a very long time, with no risk of damage to either the drivers or the amplifiers. Basically, we selected amplifier modules that are powerful enough to always maximise the driver excursion. So it essentially means you'll never clip the amplifier. No matter what your music is, no matter if the music is compressed or dynamic, no matter how loud you're playing or for how long. You'll never run in to clipping. You'll never have that distortion from the amplifier. So you'll always have the best possible sound, that the drivers are able to make. And since we have very good drivers in all our speakers, that is performance at a very high level. You definitely have the potential to make some people angry in all of these models! We made the new Focus as a family of speakers, to basically cater for different people's needs. The Focus 10 is a compact stand-mount speaker, with a 14cm woofer. It's the most powerful 14cm woofer we've ever made. And it's driven by an extremely powerful amplifier for such a small speaker. It's a 280W Pascal amplifier driving this thing. That makes it really, really capable for that size. The next step up is a floor-standing speaker, which uses two of the same woofers, and it actually has two amplifier channels also – 280W per channel – to drive that speaker. So again, a very, very impressive package in a quite small, slim speaker. The big guy in the series is the Focus 50, which is a full three-way speaker. It has a dedicated midrange. The midrange driver is basically directly from our high-end studio monitors, Contour 60 uses exactly the same midrange – so it's a very high-end midrange driver – and a pair of 18cm woofers. And these two woofers together actually put out an output that's comparable to active subwoofers. So you have that directly built into the speaker. And, again, you have 280W for the midrange, and you have 280W for the two woofers, which is enough to fully maximise the excursion at any frequency that you're driving the speaker at – up until the limit of the excursion. And given four total woofers in two relatively large cabinets, that's a very significant output. You know, if you want to compare this with a subwoofer, you'll need a serious subwoofer to actually improve on this. For the tweeter, we have 110W going into the tweeter. And, actually, that's more than enough for what you need for a tweeter because the energy in the music is mostly focused on the lower frequencies. So at the higher frequencies that the tweeter is playing, you don't really need that much energy. So 110W is actually very over-powered compared to what you're actually sending in to the tweeter. But the DSP is controlling all that, so you don't really have to think about it. We're specifying it as 110W because that's what the amplifier can do, even though it's more than enough for what we actually need for the tweeter; it's a pretty sensitive tweeter. Every driver, every speaker, every amplifier channel is powerful enough to always maximise whatever the capability of the driver is. So if anyone is asking: ‘Why 280W?’ and ‘Why do we have 280W for a midrange, and also 280W for the woofer?’… Basically, 280W is enough to maximise the dual woofers in the Focus 50. So for the midrange, it's just extra headroom. It's never a bad thing to have that extra headroom. It does result in an audibly better sound, that you can always hear; that no matter what you're doing, you never have that dynamic compression in the amplifier that you can sometimes have. Especially, if you have modern music that's very compressed, you'll actually need a high output from the amplifier, consistently over time. It needs to be able to provide that level of power. And in many cases the amplifier can do that briefly, but not over time as you're listening to your music. So if you want to listen to music for a long time, it makes a difference that the amplifier is not stressed. The impression I get from listening to the new Focus speakers is that it's always very relaxing and very effortless. It doesn't matter what type of music you're listening to… you can feel that the speaker is always able to handle what you're throwing at it. So you just really want to listen to more music. That's also why these technologies are so popular in our high-end studio monitors. Because in a studio, you're working a full 8-hour work day listening to music, and it needs to be a stressless experience. So why not have that at home as well? It makes you want to listen to more music, because it's just so effortless no matter what you're listening to. You can say the basic technology we use here is extremely similar to what we use in all of our high-end studio monitors. So we're packaging in a way, that you'd want to use at home, and we're designing it in way that fits into your living room. It doesn't really matter how good it sounds, if you don't want them in your living room. We have a simple design with very high build quality and a nice finish, and it's easy to use in everyday life. You just select your app, select your speaker as the output and start playing music. It just becomes an integral part of your everyday life. And you don't really have to think about all the technology that's behind it that is actually at the level of high-end studio monitors. I think the new Focus will make some waves in the industry because the way it is today, you're typically deciding between passive speakers, where you have a lot of emotion going in to the designs, the tuning and the build of these things. And then you have a class of speakers that are very digital and easy to use, and you can do all these advanced things, but they don't have the same attention to the detail and the emotion of listening to music from a good speaker system. You don't really get that. This is really combining those two things, and it's mainly because we took all of that emotion and attention that we usually build into our passive speakers, and said: 'What happens, if we put that into the active speakers? 'Not just in the cabinets and the drivers, but also in the amplifier design?' We have a very, very advanced amplifier design, in terms of the audio quality. So it's not just about what it can do, but the things we have done to make it sound better is extremely important as well. It's extremely advanced. That gives the new Focus I think, a unique position. You get the usability of the digital system But it's really combined with a level of performance, that we don't necessarily normally see in active speakers. If you look at active speakers from a technical point of view, there are all sorts of reasons why active speakers should be better than passive. But very often they are not better, because you didn't put the same attention into the finer details of it. You get caught up with what it can do technically, and all of the possibilities it gives you, but you don't necessarily spend the same amount of effort in terms of the tuning and the listening to it. The tuning of the speaker is a very important part of a Dynaudio speaker. So when we're tuning speakers, it's a combination of using the Jupiter measurement room and the facilities we have to take care of the technical side and all of the objective sides. At the same time, we do a lot of listening. There's a lot of building the right loud speaker, and building a speaker that sounds good. It's all about listening to it. That's what you'll do in the end as a customer, So that phase is just as important, in an active speaker as in a passive speaker. So the combination of the objective measurement results, combined with our experience in tuning very, very high end passive speakers, that results in a really high level of performance from the new Focus. A speaker like the new Focus starts out with some engineers going: ‘What if?’. 'What if we took this technology and combined it with that technology over here?' 'Could we make something, that sounds even better?' 'How great would it be – how good can we make it sound – if we combined these things?' You don't listen to technological possibilities. You listen to the actual sound coming out of the speaker. And in a big way, that's actually defined just as much by the tuning. So there are a lot of things that you don't see in the specifications sheet that still affects the sound quality. Making very high-quality sound is honestly what we've been doing for 45 years. That's relatively standard for us to do. I'm not going to say ‘easy’, but it's a standard thing for us to do. That's what we want to do. But we need to put it into a speaker that everyday customers can use. We want to put it into a package that is simple to set up, simple to use in your everyday life, and simple to live with. And that's what I think we did with the new Focus. My thing is overall the attention to detail… and one of the places you see that is once you put on the grille. If you put on a cloth grille in front of your speaker drivers it will affect the performance a little bit. So what we can do, because it's an active speaker, is we're sensing is the grille on or not. So the speaker changes the EQ to compensate for having the grille cloth in front of the drivers. And it will even signify that with a slight change of the LED in the front. And you'll be able to see in the app, that the picture changes. It's just one of those neat little things where we're really showing that we care about even that small detail of sound. And I really like it because it's not just a cool feature, it actually improves the sound, that you're reaching. Basically, one way or another, you can connect any source to the new Focus. We have the world's best streaming platform built right into the speaker, So any streaming platform you can think of, we're likely to support it directly. It's a Roon-ready endpoint, has AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, UPnP, Bluetooth, Qplay for China... Other than that, we've some physical inputs… There's an optical and coaxial digital input. We also have a very good analogue input. If you have an analogue source, for instance a vinyl player, we have an analogue input, that we've given a lot of attention. in terms of having very low noise – great sound quality from that. We've a sensitivity setting in the app, which allows you to adjust for different types of analogue sources. So we took a lot of attention to the analogue input. One of the unique features of having a secondary WiSA receiver is that the system itself connects through WiSA, but then the secondary receiver pairs to an external receiver – which means that you can switch between those seamlessly. So, if you have a WiSA-enabled TV, you switch to the WiSA TV, and then, whenever you want to hear streaming again on another source or your vinyl player, you just switch to that and it switches seamlessly between the two. Which is actually quite unique for the new Focus. So, in our Setup and Control app, we have a setting to allow you to adjust for the placement of the speakers. Depending on is it placed out into the room or is it near the wall or the corners, you can select a setting that will adjust the EQ to match accordingly. If you want a more advanced room-adaptation option, we have Dirac Live support built in. This basically means that you can use the Dirac Live software to make a measurement of your room, and then upload the measurement correction directly to the speaker via the network just using the Dirac software. If you're using a Wi-Fi connection, you basically have to choose between a long global delay, which causes lip-sync issues, or you have a very poor connection between the left and the right speakers. That means your stereo imaging is all over the place. Even the voices will move when you're listening to music – and obviously, we don't want that. So to avoid that choice, we're using the WiSA connection, which, because it runs at different frequencies in a different protocol, it allows a very, very tight connection with extremely low delay. So we've got zero lip-sync issues, as well as extremely tight imaging between the speakers. We even worked further with the software. We have custom-designed software inside the speakers where we're improving on that even further by synchronising the clock between the two speakers – which, again, locks the imaging in place between the speakers and gives a much more focused image. The WiSA connection between the speakers supports up to 24-bit/96KHz, which is basically what most high-res sources are using. And it does this with very, very tight synchronisation between the left and the right speakers. If you want even more than that, We have the option for running a coax digital cable between the speakers, and this supports up to 192KHz. It's so easy with wireless speakers today to listen to a lot of music and to listen to more music. But the real difference is: Do I want to listen to more music? I've not just heard, but also helped build speakers in very, very high price categories, so I'm used to hearing sound quality at very high level. But at the end, it comes down to: 'Do I want to go home at the end of the day and listen to music?' And that's really what I feel like with the new Focus. At the end of the day, working with sound all day, I still want to listen to music when I come home.