Product Description

Focal – Stellia

The Focal Stellia is the company’s flagship closed circumaural headphone featuring a 40mm pure Beryllium M Shaped Dome driver.

The Focal Stellias sound absolutely fantastic. Their wide-open soundstage and detailed, accurate sound treatment mean they make any genre of music sound brilliant.

If you listen to songs you think you know inside out, the Stellias’ precise separation of the frequencies means that you will probably hear details you’ve never noticed.

If you like to keep things minimal in the headphones department, you probably won’t like the showy, opulent design of the Focal Stellias. And they can feel a little chunky for wearing on the commute to work, but if luxury is your thing, the full-grain leather cups, woven cables, brushed copper accents, and matching carrying case is likely to appeal.

M-dome Driver’s Aesthetic Design and Build Quality

The Stellia is equipped with a new iteration of Focal’s 40mm M-dome driver, sporting an ultra-stiff pure Beryllium dome as with the Utopia, driven by a frameless 100% copper voice coil and suspended by a new, low-compliance, 110-micron NBR surround.

Since these are closed-back cans, they can take advantage of a bass-reflex configuration to reduce the driver excursion required for a given sound pressure level, allowing for a shorter coil. As a result, impedance is dropped from just 35 ohms and sensitivity improves to 106 dB SPL/mW. Which ousts the Elegia as the former easiest-to-drive model in Focal’s stable and bestows that crown upon the Stellia.

The new drivers are coupled with a special, volume-optimized, enclosure that employs a progressive vent to help dissipate low-frequency back-wave from bass notes, combined with a series of acoustic diffusers that break up standing waves and further dissipate any residual back-wave pressure as well as significantly stiffening the ear-cup.

A specially shaped EVA foam absorber sits behind the driver to control higher-frequency reflections. The new pads use a dual-density construction and special perforation scheme. Resulting in a more linear response up to about 10 kHz.

Stellia has an unapologetically luxurious sense to its execution. Premium materials adorn these headphones, including the full-grain leather on the headband and ear-cups. They are solidly built, where Focal continues their pattern of robust, purposeful, construction, in all metal and leather. They don’t rattle or creak.

Connections are solid. The yokes stay where you set them. And as pretty as they are, they remain as much of a serious listening tool as they are a luxury item.

High-Quality Sound with Optimum Comfort for Focal Stellia

They have an impressively wide soundstage, which makes you feel as though you’re in the same room as the musicians you’re listening to. As opposed to the rather closed-off, ‘inside your head’ sound that some over-ear headphones can create.

Focal is in the revelation business. What Focal tries to do, and it is obvious, is to produce headphones. It reveals every detail that is in the recording. You could tell it’s Focal’s main intention.

This is the first headphone, IEM, earbud, or anything that produces sound and goes on the head or ear. That can accurately produce every single detail and instrument with the first click of the volume control.

The Stellia drivers are extremely efficient and produce every detail with a minimum amount of input. And that is beneficial in many ways. There seems to be an almost perfect balance in frequency response at extremely low volume levels.

You do not have to turn up the volume so loud on the Focal Stellia to get a satisfying amount of volume either, and that in turn gives you good battery life out of portable devices, and the other benefit is that you hear all the details with no need to crank the volume up so high.

Last Thought about Focal’s Stellia

Focal’s Stellia is a wonderful close-back headphone. They provide the most enjoyable, satisfying, and overall technically-adept listening experience. Listen for yourself.

Focal – Stellia’s Specifications

• Impedance: 35 ohms
• Sensitivity: 106 dB SPL/mw @ 1kHz
• Frequency Response: 5Hz – 40kHz
• THD: 0.1% @ 1 kHz / 100dB SPL
• Driver: 40mm (1.6”) pure Beryllium “M” shaped dome.
• Weight: 435g (0.96lb)