The bottom of the right earcup is where you’ll find the USB-C and 3.5mm inputs. Just a quarter of an hour’s-worth of charging equates to another five hours of playback. So it’s just as well that battery life is anywhere between 30 hours (ANC set to ‘silent’, volume level set to ‘respectable’) and 42 hours (hard-wired) from a single charge. ![]() ![]() It’s possible to hard-wire the Bathys to a source using either USB-C or analogue 3.5mm connections – cables for each application are provided in the semi-rigid carry case – but the headphones must always be powered up no matter how they’re connected. The actual business of delivering sound is taken care of by a couple of 40mm aluminium/magnesium ‘M’-shaped dome drivers – Focal is claiming a frequency response of 15Hz to 22kHz, which seems a little more grounded in reality than the claims made by some of the more excitable competing brands. Active noise-cancellation is an ‘always on’ system, from which you can select ‘silent’ (full on), ‘soft’ (a much more mild effect that Focal seems to think is an aid to concentration) or ‘transparent’ (giving a gentle boost to external sounds in the name of both safety and sociability). Wireless connectivity is via Bluetooth 5.1, with SBC, AAC, aptX and aptX Adaptive codec compatibility. They’re equally, and rather more measurably, competitive where specification is concerned too. The Bathys are a coherent, mildly individual design, which puts them quite a distance ahead of their nominal competition where this sort of thing is concerned. The drilled holes of the ‘shell’ covering the outside of the closed-back earcups make it reminiscent of those Neostyle sunglasses Elvis Presley was so fond of during the ‘jumpsuit’ years, and there’s a further design feature in the earcups’ centre – the company’s stylised ‘flame’ logo, which has defeatable illumination. ![]() Soft, tactile leather covers the memory foam of the earpads and the outer plane of the headband, while equally pliant microfibre material keeps the inside of the headband comfortable as well as durable. But Focal has given the Bathys a well-judged hint of individuality without messing with anyone’s expectations, and that’s the first thing (but most certainly not the last) it should be congratulated for.įocal has mostly used a combination of aluminium and magnesium in the construction of the Bathys – and it keeps perceived value high as well as keeping weight down to a manageable 350g. Imbuing a product as rigorously functional as over-ear headphones will a bit of pizazz, a design flourish or two, is far from easy, of course – not only is the ‘form follows function’ principle hard at work, but prospective owners are almost reflexively mistrustful of headphones that don’t look utterly like headphones. (The name, so says Focal, is inspired by those free-diving self-propelled deep-sea submersibles called Bathyscaphes – the company says it wants the name to invoke the idea of ‘calm, depth and absolute silence’.) We’ve heard and appreciated a number of its expensive wired headphone designs already, and now the company thinks the ground has been laid for it to deliver its first pair of wireless active noise-cancelling over-ear headphones the singularly named Bathys. We have the £599 Bowers & Wilkins Px8 on our radar… and now here’s French high-end mover and shaker Focal. 5909 wireless headphones and found, not without consternation, that they come this close to justifying their £999 asking price. We’ve already reviewed the Mark Levinson No. But then (not for the first time) came Apple – it smashed the unofficial price barrier with its big-wireless-headphones-for-big-money AirPods Max, and now it’s a free-for-all. Anyone interested in properly listening knows a wired connection is the only way to go, after all – and so wireless headphones had an unspoken, but widely acknowledged, limit to their asking price. ![]() Expensive wireless over-ear headphones are only the latest case in point.įor a good while, wireless headphones were purely about convenience, nothing more. All it takes is one mildly successful toe in the water, and suddenly the swimming pool is full to overflowing.
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