A great reason to revisit your music collection

Meet the 948 — the flagship floor-standing speaker in Focal's super-impressive Aria series. If you're looking for abundant sonic detail, and a soundstage that allows a deep dive into your favorite music, read on. Focal's Aria series features advanced technologies originally developed for the company's acclaimed Utopia models, providing expressive, audiophile sound quality.

 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 advanced cone by sandwiching a layer of hollow flax fibers between two thin layers of fiberglass. In the Aria 948, the 6-1/2" midrange and both 8-1/4" woofers are made of this composite. Those dual woofers combine to produce taut, tuneful bass to anchor your music and movies.

 Inverted dome tweeter looks different, sounds terrific

The Aria series also features Focal's 1" aluminum/magnesium inverted dome tweeter. 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.

The inverted dome's spatial characteristics and wide dispersion are further enhanced by the waveguide plate it's mounted on. In the horizontal plane, the tweeter's frequency response varies by only ±0.5dB. The result is an incredibly stable soundstage, even for listeners not seated in the central sweet spot.

 Stylish, vibration-resistant cabinet

All Aria speakers feature ultra-rigid MDF cabinets with sturdy internal bracing and non-parallel sides. Focal takes these steps to eliminate the unwanted vibrations that lead to "boxy" colorations in the sound. The handsome cabinets have a traditional look, but with a few unexpected touches — a leatherette finish on the front, and a glass top surface.