The Focal Chora Surround transforms your living room into a true movie theater thanks to its French acoustic technologies and design optimized for seamless wall integration. Drawing on expertise from Saint-Étienne, this effects speaker accurately reproduces soundscapes, whether for the side or rear channels of your home theater setup.
Inheriting Focal’s French know-how, this sealed 2-way speaker features the Slatefiber cone and TNF tweeter—two innovations that raise performance standards in this price range. Its compact, beveled design, just 10 cm thick, and invisible mounting system offer discreet integration that preserves your room’s aesthetics while creating an immersive, enveloping sound experience.
The Slatefiber Cone: A World-First in Eco-Friendly Design
The Focal Chora Surround incorporates a 16.5 cm Slatefiber cone, the result of four years of research and development. This composite sandwich cone combines non-woven recycled carbon fibers with a thermoplastic polymer, making Focal the first audio manufacturer to use recycled materials in its drivers.
The innovation lies in the unidirectional orientation of the non-woven carbon fibers, which simultaneously optimizes rigidity, damping, and lightness. This technical approach delivers perfectly balanced midrange with minimal coloration, while maintaining the dynamics needed for surround effects. The cone’s distinctive slate color comes naturally from the materials used, creating a unique visual signature.
Manufacturing is carried out entirely at Focal’s workshops in Saint-Étienne, using a semi-automated industrial tool developed specifically for this cone. This mastery of French production ensures consistent quality and environmental traceability.
The TNF Tweeter: Surgical Precision in the Highs
The 25 mm TNF tweeter with an inverted aluminum/magnesium alloy dome is another major technological asset. This evolution of Focal’s classic tweeter features a Poron suspension, a memory foam material directly derived from the prestigious Utopia Beryllium tweeters.
This innovative suspension reduces distortion by a factor of three in the 2000–3000 Hz range, an area of high sensitivity for the human ear. The specially developed waveguide further enhances the already excellent spatialization of the inverted dome, ensuring a stable frequency response of ±0.5 dB on the horizontal plane. This stability makes the listening position much less critical—a decisive advantage for effects speakers.
The inverted dome configuration allows for optimal reproduction up to 28 kHz, well beyond human hearing, ensuring unrestricted rendering of the finest harmonics in high-resolution recordings.
Installation and Versatile Use
The Chora Surround stands out for its pragmatic approach to installation. Unlike bookshelf speakers, which are often unsuitable for wall mounting, it adopts a specially designed format with beveled sides, reducing thickness to a maximum of 10 cm. This geometry minimizes intrusion into the room while optimizing internal acoustics.
The included wall mount allows for invisible and secure installation. Self-adhesive pads are placed on the back of the speaker in designated spots, while the bracket is fixed at tweeter height for optimal alignment. The system lets you connect cables before hanging, greatly simplifying installation.
This dedicated wall-mount approach avoids the placement constraints of stands or furniture, which are often problematic in surround setups where space is limited.
Optimal Positioning for Spatial Effects
The effectiveness of surround effects largely depends on speaker placement. The Chora Surround is ideally positioned at ear level or slightly above, allowing for even diffusion of soundscapes. Its very low directivity, thanks to the inverted dome, provides flexibility in placement without compromising sound quality.
The sealed enclosure avoids placement issues related to ports, which can be particularly tricky with wall mounting. This configuration ensures controlled, predictable response regardless of the installation environment.
Consistency with the Chora Ecosystem
The Chora Surround naturally integrates into the Chora range ecosystem by sharing the same drivers as other models. This technological consistency ensures a homogeneous sound signature between the main speakers (Chora 826, 816, 806), the Chora Center, and the effects speakers.
The TNF tweeter, common to the entire range, guarantees smooth spatialization of panoramic effects, with no timbre discontinuity as sounds move between channels. This acoustic continuity is especially important in modern mixes that make intensive use of directional effects.
