The Focal Dôme Flax 2.0 Black Pack reinvents the compact speaker with its unique “sound spot” concept featuring adjustable directionality. With a diameter of just 14 cm, this discreet speaker preserves your living space while delivering exceptional sound quality, ideal for rooms of 30 to 40 m².
Equipped with the innovative Flax sandwich cone, made from natural French flax fiber, it benefits from over five years of research and development. This work has resulted in remarkable sound definition and optimal linearity, for a highly precise listening experience.
Flax Technology: Patented French Innovation
The Flax cone is the technological heart of this speaker, featuring a sandwich structure with a core of very high-quality French flax fiber placed between two thin sheets of fiberglass. This structure meets all the criteria for a high-fidelity cone: lightness for good dynamics, rigidity for solid bass, and damping to deliver a neutral, natural sound without coloration.
France is the leading European country for cultivating textile flax, and the French flax fiber used by Focal is considered the best in the world. This natural material, twice as light as fiberglass, offers remarkable rigidity and exceptional damping qualities, promising neutral and natural listening with outstanding speed and sound definition.
Unlike the high-end W cones, which require manual manufacturing and are reserved for exceptional products, the industrial process developed for the Flax cone allows this high-performance sandwich technology to be made more widely available.
High-Tech Tweeter and Acoustic Design
The inverted dome tweeter in aluminum-magnesium alloy is a Focal technological signature, offering the advantage of low directivity and a small-diameter voice coil for better acceleration. Aluminum increases the dome’s rigidity and reduces distortion, while the addition of magnesium provides excellent damping.
The suspension connecting the dome to its support uses a shape-memory material, Poron, derived from the renowned Utopia Beryllium tweeter, reducing distortion by a factor of three between 2000 Hz and 3000 Hz, a range where the ear is highly sensitive.
The Focal Dôme Flax compact speaker uses a sealed spherical enclosure, ensuring excellent transient response and strong attenuation of cabinet resonances. This design optimizes acoustic purity by avoiding unwanted coloration.
“Sound Spot” Design and Versatile Installation
The Dôme’s design is functional, sophisticated, and extremely refined, with a completely smooth round shape and no visible screws when the grille is in place. The complex pivoting articulation system is perfectly integrated and invisible, allowing precise orientation as needed.
Conceived as an adjustable “sound spot,” Dôme becomes an ideal music source for any living space. The Focal Dôme Flax satellite speaker is equipped with an articulated stand for orientation according to the room’s needs and can be easily mounted on a wall or ceiling.
On a stand, wall-mounted, ceiling-mounted, or placed on furniture, the speakers fit easily into any room thanks to their compact size and black lacquered finishes, which are both elegant and timeless. The glossy lacquered aluminum body offers a premium finish that pairs perfectly with modern flat screens.
Acoustic Performance and Improvements Over Previous Models
Dôme Flax benefits from the innovative natural flax-based composite sandwich cone, already proven in the high-fidelity Aria 900 speakers and Car Audio Performance kits, delivering a clear gain in definition and better linearity in frequency response.
Users who have replaced their Dome Polyglass with Dome Flax report that “the FLAX seem more at ease,” with “a slightly more natural sound than the Polyglass,” and that they “fill the room better in terms of output.” Comparative tests reveal that the Dôme Flax sounds “the most neutral” among speakers in its category.
The Flax cone, with its hollow fibers, offers a stiffness-to-mass ratio superior to conventional materials like polyglass, allowing faster movement in response to signals with less distortion.
Compatibility and System Optimization
The Focal Dôme Flax speaker deserves quality amplification, ideally equipped with an active high-pass filter, as found in home theater amplifiers, setting the crossover frequency at a minimum of 80 Hz. Without reinforcement from wall proximity, the front speakers require a higher crossover point, around 120 Hz.
Compatible with the Sub Air subwoofer, the Dôme Flax 5.1 or 2.1 system is the ideal solution for sound in a living room. For an even more complete setup, Dôme Flax pairs perfectly with a floorstanding speaker system like Aria Evo X or in-wall integration solutions.
