Focal CMS 65

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Price: $895.00   

Product Feature

• Bass/Mid Driver: 6-1/2" Polyglass cone mid-bass
• High-Freq. Driver: 1" Aluminum/Magnesium inverted dome tweeter
• Freq. Response: 45Hz - 28kHz
• Amplifiers: 100W / 60W - Class A/B
• Special Features Die cast aluminum cabinet LF/HF shelving - Desktop Notch Filter Rubber decoupling platform

Product Description

Are you ready to monitor like the big boys? Then step up to Focal monitors! Favored by engineers for their unbending truthfulness, Focal is what you want when you need to hear every last detail. The Focal CMS 65 brings staggering fidelity to a price point that's perfect for serious home studio recordists, yet the supreme quality makes the CMS 65right at home in pro facilities too.

Focal CMS 65 Review

These CMS 65 speakers are designed for use as studio monitors, high end powered speakers for professional audio engineers to plug into their consoles for studio recording and mixing sessions. They have won many awards and accolades for their sharp, accurate imaging, all packed into an easily manageable bookshelf size.

Me, I just spend a lot of time on the computer and I finally got tired of listening to the el cheapo Harman/Karden HK 195 computer speakers that I've had for the last decade. Along the way, I added a small 5" powered "subwoofer" and tried other computer speakers - including the "top of the line" Logitech Z-5500 (only $258 at the time, lots of bass, but horribly muddy, murky sound), and the Creative Inspire t3200 (not bad sounding, just heavily colored and needing an equalizer to even it out). All of these computer speakers were hampered by a lack of accurate sound reproduction, and the HK 195 was actually the best of them all, but it suffered from a distorted bass.

I thought about getting a set of high quality regular stereo speakers, but that would have meant getting an amplifier to power these speakers and so on. As far as top quality powered speakers that work with computers, there is just not a lot out there besides the low end compatriots of the Logitechs and Creative Labs computer speakers. I wanted more better, and so after more Googling, I found the rarified world of audio engineers and studio monitors.

The audio engineers in the online forums spoke most highly about the Focal Solo6 Be, which is pretty much the state of the art in sound accuracy. The CMS 65 gets good marks also, but isn't quite up to that level. Still, when I compared the two, the CMS 65 seemed to fit my needs much better.

Besides being somewhat less expensive and having a sleek looking heavy black shell of all-aluminum, the CMS 65 has RCA plugs as well as an XLR connector whereas the Solo6Be comes only with XLR connectors (high end computer sound cards generally come with RCA plugs whereas the built-in sound chipset on a computer/laptop almost always output through headphone style stereo jacks - i.e., stereo 1/8" a.k.a. 3.5mm plugs. These plugs need a "Y" RCA adapter). The CMS 65 also has more tweaks and configurations available in the back panel, including a notch filter at 160 Hz, to get rid of that resonance boost which tends to show up from setting speakers on a desktop (I had actually started hearing this resonance with the little subwoofer I was using in my old computer speakers).

Other high end monitors I briefly considered were the Genelec 8040A and the Adams Audio A7X. The Genelec has a rear facing port that makes the sound more dependent on placement relative to walls, while the much less expensive Adams A7X has a more colored audio response that is boosted at both the highs and lows. And there was the Audio Engine A5+ which is a lot less expensive but has only one amplifier for the two speakers, and is not left-right switchable (the directional tweeters are designed to point in only one direction).

Straight out of their boxes, the two CMS 65s sounded awful, to be quite blunt. That was expected from everything I'd read, it was just surprising how bad they sounded brand new. They needed a few days of being played non-stop to loosen up the speaker diaphragms. Once they got warmed up however - wow! The clarity and sharpness of the musical image is incredible. Music with soft, subtle vocals suddenly sound like the musician is right there in your room, singing in front of you. The accuracy of the musical image is startling for people like me who have never heard sound quality on the level of a professional grade studio monitor.

Music that does not have any drums or other low bass percussion instruments - e.g. vocals and guitars - all sound fantastic with these speakers by themselves, but .... if you listen to a wider range of music, ultimately you just can't get away from the fact that the CMS 65s are still missing the very low end bass below 45Hz.

Enter the Rhythmik F12, a powered subwoofer, the product of another Google search, which I added to the system. Musical heaven! (almost).

I selected the Rhythmik F12 (rather than the CMS subwoofer - which has a disappointing low end roll-off of only 30 Hz) based on reviews and data sheets that make clear that this is a terrific powered subwoofer that emphasizes accurate imaging rather than simply cranking out massive quantities of murky low bass rumbling. It has a bass extension down to 10 Hz so you can FEEL the bass rather than just hear it.

I ordered the version of the Rhythmik F12 with the high level amplifier outputs (A370PEQ instead of the standard A370PEQ3) to simplify the crossover connection to the CMS 65s. Set at a crossover of 80 Hz, the F12 takes up the low bass load from the CMS65s, letting them excel in the high bass, midrange and highs. The low bass thumps out amazingly clear with the F12 handling it. Bookshelf size speakers tend to have increasing harmonic distortion at their very low ends, even as they maintain total audio output before the roll-off, and the CMS 65 is no exception from the data that I've seen.

It's a wonderful sound system combination.

Next on the list - a high end sound card! With all this accurate imaging of sound, I can now hear faint whispers of the electrical noise coming out from my computer's built in audio chipset, which sound like crickets chirping, but which I think are the electrical signatures of the hard disc drives doing their read/writes.

I ended up getting the ASUS Essence STX PCI-E sound card. That got rid of the chirping electrical noise, and there are some definite further improvements in sound - very clean, rich, and fuller depth. Installing the card was quite an adventure however, best told in a separate review.

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