Popular Focal
WHY TO SHOP WITH US
at Peter Tyson
Focal
Focal was founded in 1979 in Saint-Étienne, France, by engineer and passionate music lover Jacques Mahul, who set up the company's first loudspeaker workshop inside a family precision-engineering business. Working initially alongside just one other person, Mahul set out to build speaker drivers that genuinely improved on what the market offered — and it didn't take long for that ambition to show results.
The breakthrough came in 1982 with the DB13, a bookshelf loudspeaker built around Focal's innovative Polyglass cone technology that delivered volume and dynamics competitive with far larger speakers, instantly establishing the brand at the top end of the market. From there, Focal expanded steadily and boldly: into car audio in 1989, driven by Mahul's own love of long drives with great sound; into professional studio monitoring; and, in 1995, into the extraordinary Grande Utopia, a flagship loudspeaker that the international press hailed as a genuine technological achievement and which cemented Focal's leadership among audiophiles worldwide.
Today Focal operates from four manufacturing facilities, three of them still in Saint-Étienne, exporting to more than 160 countries while keeping engineering and production firmly in France. From flax-cone bookshelf speakers to beryllium-tweeter flagships, Focal's driver technology remains developed entirely in-house — proof that Mahul's original small workshop grew into one of the true benchmark names in high-fidelity sound.