Focal vs Sony
In the lockdown times, one of the local hi-fi shops was doing some sales and on impulse I decided to dip my toes into the water of Focal’s entry-level headphones; introduced in 2016 this was around 2021.
For the first couple of years of ownership they inspired a hunger for more of the Focal headphones; alas, after that, the love has been killed by a whole other thing that it turns out Focal are well-known for: atrocious support.
Don’t get me wrong: the Listens are very nice headphones. They do good bass without drowning you in it. The sound is clear and accurate; they’re comfortable and fold down well. The support for a small off board mic to use them with a phone or tablet is handy.
But here’s the problem: headphones wear out, and the ear pads wear out most of all. It’s hardly surprising when you remember the pads are sitting on or around your sweaty ear-skin, slowly nibbling away at the fabric. The cushion will get compressed with time, too. There are other points of concern—cables love to snag and the wiring to break, the headband may give up after being bent on and off your head and so on—but the pads are gonna go if you use your headphones regularly.
I’m sure you can see where this is headed.
I loaned them out to one of my kids for a piano class and unfortunately one of the pads tore around the edge of the can. That’s not great, since it suggests it probably wasn’t really designed or manufactured well in the first place, but when I went to buy a replacement pad… nothing.
Bear in mind at this point they were being sold only 2 or 3 years before I wanted to look for a part. And while they were cheap for Focal they were not cheap. These were $300–$400 new. And Focal’s support is “fuck you.” Taking a look around forums and such suggested that this isn’t a particularly uncommon problem with Focal, either: not just the Listens, but across their range into their stratospherically priced models of headphone and speaker you can find people complaining bitterly about things breaking and then having an absolute arsehole of a job getting spares.
(Focal still sell the studio-branded version of these as the Listen Pro. They have a nice case and a 1/4” version of the cable. It does not appear any easier to get pads for that model, either.)
The only saving grace is that third parties have some on offer, at about a third the price of the whole headset. So I’ll give those a go, because I don’t want to chuck a pair of nice headphones for the want of pads.
Let’s contrast them with my old Sony WH-CH700s—a similar vintage model, superseded by the CH710s in 2020—can still get parts. I know this because I gave my pair of these to one of my children when I’d replaced them with something else, and they’ve been used daily since then. And the pads have worn through. Getting replacements was a matter of ordering the official Sony pads from the official Sony parts stockist in Aotearoa and having them show up a few days later. I think they cost $25 each, not the thick end of $100 for a pair.
And not just pads; in fact, I can easily find Sony-supplied parts for pretty much everything that could go wrong, saving only the logic board. Headband? Cups? Speaker? Battery assembly? Sure, no problem, sold direct to me with prices that would make repairing them feasible. And these are not Sony’s high-end models. These were mid-tier wireless headphones sold to people who wanted the WH1000 range and couldn’t afford them.
So, I guess, I have a new appreciation for Sony’s after-sales support and I guess Focal have done me the favour of curing me of any desire to spend thousands of dollars on their fancy headphones, because I don’t fancy taking the risk of finding that the nay-sayers online are right about my chances of being unable to fix any problems that arise.
