ShortCircuit where we are the focal
bathys or if you are French the focal
batis which is actually how they're pronounced because they are a French
company known for making all sorts of wonderful expansive audio equipment and
this is their first attempt at making it
big in the truly Wireless space and they've come in with the batis what is
that well it was named after the bathosphere which is a predecessor to
the submarine that basically just went down and up a lot of uh people died in
it a lot of French people too because they were pretty popular lots of scientists there and it's named after
the bathosphere because they believe that it represents silence and being cut
off from the world because these are noise canceling headphones with Hi-Fi
sound and French design take a look at the boxy cat here Home Collection your
maturities collection and professional collection cool don't know what those
mean features finally active noise canceling SBC AAC Qualcomm
aptx and aptx adaptive that's a little misleading SBC is the default Bluetooth
codec for any sort of audio and aptx adaptive is backwards compatible with
app decks so really it just has sp8 and
SPC is not another feature it just has AAC and Qualcomm aptx we don't have ldac
which is a great Hi-Fi proprietary audio codec and apparently they didn't want to
pay Sony the licensing money just too bad one thing interesting about these
headphones is that they have a USB DAC included a DAC is a digital analog
converter which takes a digital signal like the one from your USBC port or your
computer and converts it into an analog signal so that it can be played through
speakers that bump back and forth they claim 30 hours of battery life and
speaker drivers hand crafted in France opening the box right here we have the
first steps this QR code to scan for a quick start guide and a QR code to scan
for an application so downloading the app these are the headphones in a nice
case we'll get to that in a second and uh some paperwork that's neat
this is a nice hard shell case um the zipper feels good this is like
just very premium it's also not too thick it's pretty good which uh inspires
confidence I hate when you have a travel focused headphone that has a very thick
case kind of defeats the purpose oh and look at those those are just beautiful
you got this kind of like spiraling almost like Fibonacci Sequence
kind of thing coming out from the middle you have their logo right in the middle
inside we get a three pole headphone connector so 3.5 millimeter uh so that
means no microphone in this and kind of a less than exceptional cable it is just
made of like uh soft plastic which is a little disappointing from this brand and
this price point I'd expect something a little bit more premium feeling but as
long as it's not like a loud cable and there's no cable noise introduced that's A-Okay we also get a USBC 2C cable again
similar quality it looks like it's about the length I think they're both four feet I do appreciate the cable ties that
makes it easy to keep things nice and neat and I also like how they have this little section for uh your cables that
are relevant to the headphone just keep them right in there and I really like
this there's a mesh pocket at the top which allows me to store a bunch of extra stuff and let's take a look at the
headphones again as I said I am just smitten with the design I think they are
beautiful um very striking too the top is I
believe it's real leather
this is almost like an Alcantara or something on the headband very soft it's
more of a firm kind of foam there it seems like it's gonna be very
comfortable uh you have metal for the headband this
feels like there's metal construction on these hinges here
might just be plastic but it's a nice firm feeling plastic or it's plastic
with like a metal they're not too heavy so I'd be surprised if there's too much metal in here nice deep ear cups these
ear cups are removable which is great because they're usually the first thing that goes I believe they're also leather
real leather ear cups and inside you can see the drivers they're angled towards
your ears which typically tends to help with the Sound Stage so you can kind of
see how there's like a little lip there's a little up here but it's not
totally flat focal has this proprietary Tech where they have an m-shaped speaker
so basically it's like the cone goes like this and then down in the middle as
opposed to just being a straight cone and they credit that to why they have
such a unique and distinct and uh incredible sound so they put those same
kind of drivers in here these are similar drivers to what you'd find on
their high-end audiophile headphones speaking of which
high end so these are relatively cheap
and when I say relatively I mean relative to the rest of focal's lineup
these are 800 this is a company that
sells like five thousand dollar headphones and even more expensive
speakers so for anything this is this is kind of mainstream which means that it's
not competing in a similar space than what most Shoppers are looking at this
is competing against the mark Levinson's number 5909 which is a thousand dollar
headphone and the Bowers and Wilkins px8
which is like a 700 headphone they're competing with lots of audio files which
means I have very high expectations for one audio quality two ANC and three
usability if I'm spending this much money on a wireless headphone something
that's supposed to be about convenience probably more so than audio
I need to make sure that these companies need to nail it when you buy something
like airpods Max Apple has such a great user experience they have great noise
canceling that you can forgive the less
than perfect audio that's on them they're not don't worry airpods Max
users you guys have good audio the headphones are ugly as but so you
have to be able to you have to be able to compete with the Heavy Hitters and the if if I'm having a better experience
on my 400 Sony headphones or my 600 Apple headphones that's a problem
unless these sounds somehow way more immaculately better than other
headphones um but let's talk about the user experience on the headphones themselves
we have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack a USB type-c a
button There's No Label this is for your voice
assistant we have the off DAC and on
setting so the DAC again is for that USBC DAC that we talked about earlier we
have a volume up and volume down as well as your
multi-use button so that'll be your pause play Skip ahead skip back we also
have a button on the left ear cup specifically for controlling your noise
canceling which is great having lots of physical buttons makes things really
easy to use I know what buttons I'm pressing I know what they're going to do it's a lot nicer than gestures or many
different combinations of TAPS you'll be using the DAC whether you are listening
through the USBC cable or the three and a half millimeter Jack
uh one thing to note that is that that means that these are active headphones
which means that they will be using battery even when you're listening to
the 3.5 millimeter Jack I think
they charge at the same time as you're listening if you're using the USBC DAC
if they do die on you it's just a 15 minute plug for five hours of battery
which is great love fast charging when you are using the 3.5 millimeter Jack
it's important to note that you cannot charge these at the same time it doesn't
matter if you have the USBC plugged in and the headphone jack plugged in you
just can't charge because it's using the active amplifier oh you can't use a
microphone with the 3.5 millimeter Jack even the microphones that are included
in here why because when you're listening through the 3.5 millimeter
Jack you can't be connected to another Bluetooth device what would have been
nice is if they made this a four pole a combo headphone and microphone Jack but
uh sadly they didn't this isn't the biggest problem but it's a convenience
thing and when you're paying this much money for something I want every part of
this experience to be smooth I don't have to think about anything which at all just work and also I found very I
found virtually no difference between listening to any of the inputs whether it was Bluetooth the DAC or the 3.5
millimeter Jack it was all sounded great now
let's turn them on oh look they light up just like Linus's
eyes light up when we tell you about sponsors like brilliant thanks brilliant
for sponsoring this video brilliant is a Hands-On and interactive way to learn
stem topics they offer thousands of courses with new topics to learn each
month like their computer science fundamentals course their services can
be used to supplement a college education or you can use it if getting
Smart's just something you like to do if you don't understand the basics of a
problem how are you going to troubleshoot them brilliant avoids teaching you what to think and focuses
on teaching you how to think allowing you to solve problems on your own sounds
like a good time well the first 200 people who head to brilliant.org Short
Circuit will get 20 off an annual premium subscription one thing I find
that's really nice about these is that these have really nice big ear cups so
they go all the way around your ears they're very spacious um they're not the
deepest so if you have ears that stick out a lot to the sides you might find
them kind of uncomfortable I think they are amazing I've worn these just for
hours and hours at a time and uh have not had any issues with Comfort I also
haven't had any issues with getting a good seal which keeps the sound
consistent and the automatic noise canceling working well like they articulate
and they tilt blah blah blah like
they got everything you need for a really comfy pair of headphones and because they're not too heavy they're
not exhausting and like if you're moving around a lot they stay on your head
pretty well I mean doing that you're going to knock off any pair of headphones
I wouldn't work out in these because they're way too expensive could you imagine dropping like a 20 pound weight
on this thing you'd be very very sad but feasibly if you're like in a hostel
you're going to be able to move the clamping force is great the foam on the
side is plush it's just a wonderful wonderful experience these guys have
been doing it for a long time in the luxury space and you can tell everything
that they've learned over the many years they've been making luxury products has been put into this and it's just an
impeccable feeling experience and that carries over to sound full disclosure
I've been listening to these for a little while I took them on a trip with me and then I left them in another
province which was stressful because they weren't mine and they are eight
hundred dollars luckily they made it here shout out to my mom for getting
them in the mail and I have some thoughts about them they sound really
really freaking good these are very much tied to the harman Target curve uh what
the heck does that mean the harman Target is a research-based target curve
for how to tune your headphones so that's how loud they should be at any
given frequency the harm and Target will sound relatively neutral to 60 of people
and just sound good to like 90 of people
and when we look at the response curves then we got Labs to do we can see that
this is a very accurate reproduction of
the harman Target on the y-axis is a normalized volume so if you're playing a
tone across the whole frequency everything should and it's totally flat you should
see a very flat line that means that nowhere on the frequencies whether it's
400 Hertz or 1000 Hertz is anything louder than anything else we can see
there's a base shelf there's a pronounced increase in the base then it
follows with a dip in the mids and then a spike kind of in the higher treble area and we fall off towards the really
really high notes so things like around like 16 000 kilohertz and stuff it dips
right off a lot of people can't hear those kind of sounds because most people
have hearing loss from just existing and as you can see this headphone the Orange
Line matches that curve very very nicely
there's a lot of wavering and stuff in the high end a lot of that is due to
just the effects of high frequencies and how they don't really go through stuff
and because measuring those high frequencies is kind of imprecise now
this doesn't mean that this is going to sound great to your ears this is based
on headphones plugged into a robot specifically the one at the
headphones.com offices shout out to headphones.com for letting us use their
head simulator because ours hasn't come
in yet we're going to look back at another graph later when we talk about noise canceling but let's just talk
about how they sound to my ears they sound great they have a beautiful Sound
Stage to me things are located beautifully around me when I'm listening
to these headphones especially for closed backs they have great bass reproduction and I
think vocals really really shine on this especially uh some of the higher female
vocals I listen to think like singers in the high range like Whitney Houston
artists like St Vincent who kind of are in that like soprano like mezzo-soprano
kind of area just wonderful there's really nothing I can fault about it
maybe it's a little laid back because in the high end frequencies it's not quite
so raised so to some people who are used
to that it might sound a little imprecise or warm to me sounds sounds
right on the money in terms of noise canceling though it's kind of mid it's
not as good as the Sony's it's not as good as the airpods when you have the
ANC on you do hear a little bit of a noise floor increase so there's kind of
a static that's always kind of playing however
they do an admirable job it blocks out sounds like on the airplane they were
fine blocked of a lot of the airplane noise you can see in this image this is
in comparison to the airpods pro now I
get that that's a pretty different uh set of headphones
uh one they're in ears the green line is the focal Batiste and the blue line is
the airpods pro what you can see is that on the low end these block out less
noise the LA the line is closer to zero what we want to see is maximum noise
reduction and you can see really in the mids kind of around the 1000 Hertz area
or lots of human voices are we really do
not do as well as the Apple airpods these tend to win out in the higher
frequencies because they're over ears because they're just bigger higher
frequencies are easily blocked just by General Mass so these having ear cups
and like plastic at the back and stuff like that makes things cancel a lot
easier in the high end so like the fricatives you're talking about like
your s's your t's your your all of those
high-pitched sounds like this is oh
a little bit disappointing there just because of the price point these are at but they probably are as good as the
Sennheiser momentum threes if you if you want kind of like a baseline if you
don't how those sound I've had some opinions from around the office saying
that these are a little bit lacking in bass luckily you can fix that with the
equalizer that's in the app the app is called focal and name uh n-a-i-m they're
like another company that makes like receivers and other digital audio
products they've teamed up with focal to create this app and it works with
some other speakers and other things like that so in the app there are three
main things you can adjust you can adjust the EQ the noise cancellation and
the led the the LED is a good one I
remember I took these on a flight and when the cabin lights turned off the my
girlfriend who was sitting beside me she just stared at me like this she was like
because these things they don't seem that bright right now in the studio but
they're really really bright in the dark room luckily there's settings between
dim and off they're not RGB though noise cancellation you can choose between
silent soft and transparent there's no
way to turn it completely off I wish
that you could because sometimes I like to be able to hear a little bit more than even what soft will do but I don't
want to have transparency mode where it's actively blasting noises into my
ears if you didn't like the sound signature you can fix it in the EQ
thankfully they include one however it's just a five band EQ which I think is not
enough I would rather have eight or even 12 to really be able to dial in exactly
the sound that I want but some is better than none uh they come with a couple of
presets and you can customize your own preset you just drag them to where you
want them to be you click save as new preset type it in
yeah so the app is very Bare Bones you
can configure your voice assistant Auto standby settings whether or not you
want that to happen you do want it you're gonna forget to hit the switch sometimes you want Auto standby to be a
thing it gets the job done one interesting thing is that if you set the
EQ in the app it adjusts the EQ of the headphones no matter where you're
listening to them so say I go I said that you keep the loudness and then I
disconnect from this phone and go listen somewhere else those EQ settings will
actually be maintained which is great because then you know how it's going to
sound with any device you can dial it in exactly how you want it and it's stored
on the headphones that's a great feature I don't need to be like oh it sounds
amazing on my Android phone where I have my dialed in EQ but like garbage on my
Windows device where I don't have an EQ or on my Apple device where there's no
system-wide EQ Apple just let me have just just make one at the end of the day
where does that leave us with the focal with the focal batis they're very
expensive um they're out of the price range of most people lots of people you can buy
cars for 800 not good cars mind you but
cars which makes these hard to recommend however these are a truly Hi-Fi pair of
headphones and if you're in the market for something that's High Fidelity and
versatile and you don't mind traveling with 800 of merchandise on your head at
any given moment these are an excellent
solution especially if you're not in need of massive amounts of noise canceling but if you're everyone else
consider something like the 400 Sony xm5s those have
solid sound better noise canceling and
Sony has years of experience in the market making high quality headphones
they also have a better app in my opinion or you could go with the
Sennheiser momentum Force for 350 which will give you a sound signature that's
closer to these but at
less than half the price I know that those are completely different price
categories but you are really getting 80 to 90 percent of the performance of
these at like half the price but
if you want the best of the best this is
not a bad place to start and if you want the best of the best YouTube content get
subscribed to ShortCircuit where we talk about tech
all the time always and forever and
check out a video about another expensive pair of headphones like the master and dynamic MW 75s 65s I don't
know I still use those at my desk I think they sound pretty okay also very
expensive wait you still have those I do