Focal Bathys Wireless Headphones: A Second Look.

Our Mel Martin had already done a thoughtful and excellent review of the Focal Bathys headphones earlier this year and came away impressed. I’d sampled the Bathys a few times at various audio shows and my thoughts about them seemed to echo his assessments. Fine then, an excellent set of headphones, “finito,” case closed. Well…not so fast. A set of circumstances soon arose that allowed me the opportunity to put the Bathys through a bit more of a long-term evaluation.

This past late spring, I was scheduled to do some international traveling to the Munich High-End show and then to Italy to visit 3 audio manufacturers. This would normally mean that my trusty Mark Levinson No. 5909 ANC headphones would once again be my indispensable travel companion. They have proven themselves time and time again. Unfortunately, one of my sons had absconded with my No. 5909 headphones for an extended period leaving me essentially “ANC-canless” for my trip. What was I to do? Noise cancellation for me is nice but not an essential feature. The wireless aspect however is. I’ll take certain wired headphones on a trip in a pinch, but I’d prefer not to when an excellent set of wireless cans is available. Something had to be done!

An email to the fine folks at Focal secured me a pair of Focal Bathys with the understanding that I would put them through an extended real-world review period. Beyond the Germany and Italy trip, I knew I had at least 3 other domestic flights in the cards along with, it would turn out, a trip to London in the fall. A thorough usage scenario, and the only reason worth taking something like this on.

I found flying with the Focal Bathys is generally a very straightforward and enjoyable experience. The headphones themselves are fairly lightweight and comfortable. They’re not featherweights mind you, but they balance the feel of having some substance to them with remaining easy to wear for hours on end.

 

The app that helps access all the features, in addition to the hard buttons on the earcups, is very streamlined and easy to use. It has 3 settings for noise cancellation: Transparent, Soft, and Silent. I found that for airline travel, the Soft setting worked sufficiently well for me in terms of blocking out enough outside and engine noise that what remained made for a good level of “white noise” to help me sleep on a long flight. The Silent setting, while more effective, put a little too much pressure on my eardrums to be comfortable for very long. Keep in mind though, different people have varying degrees of tolerance for that whole sensation of pressure or “eardrum suck” (as some term it) that noise cancellation causes when engaged.

The app also has a setting for selecting from 3 included EQ presets (Home, Loudness, and Dynamic), including a 5-band graphic equalizer to create and save your own custom preset. The app describes the Dynamic setting as closely following the “HARMAN target curve” which is nice that FOCAL provides you with that option. For my taste, I found that starting with the stock tuning and using the graphic equalizer to add a 1.5dB boost in the 62 Hz band gave me the overall sound that worked best with the variety of music I listened to.

With my EQ preset saved, the FOCAL Bathys make for a great sounding goto headphone choice for almost any situation. To my ears, the treble comes across as clean and detailed without sounding fatiguing. The midrange remains solid and appealing sounding with vocals and when I listen to tracks with complex instrumentation, everything remains clear and identifiable. The Bathys’ bass performance has that nice sense of punch that I look for in headphones along with the level of clarity and depth that adds foundation and substance to the music. The key is that it does this without becoming overly thick-sounding in the upper bass to lower-midrange regions as can happen with some other headphones.

Battery life seemed very good with a single full charge getting me through a two-week stretch, taking me from Columbus, Ohio to Munich by air, then to 3 cities in Italy by train, and finally from Rome back to Columbus again. Between travel stints, I used the Bathys as my regular “daily driver” headphones when exercising and walking the dog, and a two-week stretch between charges became a very regular cycle.

The rigid travel case is just the right dimension to easily toss in a backpack and resilient enough to keep the Bathys thoroughly well protected. At the six-month mark and having just gotten back from a press junket in London, the fit and finish of the headphones still looks excellent. Everything still feels tight and well put together, and there is no noticeable creasing or cracking of the faux leather earpads due to heat, sweat, and other elements. Even the “suede-ish” underside of the headband shows no signs of deterioration.

As complete as the FOCAL Bathys already are as a mobile companion, FOCAL saw fit this past September to push out an app update that adds hearing compensation functionality to its bag of tricks. This new feature technology is licensed from a company called Mimi which has established expertise in the field of hearing compensation.

Selecting the new “Sound Personalization” option in the app begins to walk you through a very easy-to-follow, step-by-step routine to practice and finally administer a hearing test on yourself, through the headphones. The actual testing routine is rather well thought out as it accounts for your age and advises you on what to look out for with the testing tones and gets you comfortable with practice runs before you start the real test. The test takes a total of about 15 minutes and recommends that you are in a quiet environment, free of any distractions to obtain the most accurate results. The app also allows you to register with Mimi and store and access multiple hearing test results under your account. The Bathys themselves will only store one set of test results at a time. You can also turn the compensation on and off on the fly and adjust its level of intensity from 0 – 100, with 50% being the default level.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the results of the test routine or had any way to confirm its accuracy. The last time I had my hearing properly evaluated (2 years ago), the results showed I could recognize sounds up to 13.5 kHz. So, what would, and wouldn’t I be able to tell from the Mimi test and would I like the resulting sound? Well, I have to say that I was quite pleasantly surprised at hearing compensation results when everything was said and done. From what I could tell by switching the results on and off, the Mimi compensation seemed to gently push the upper treble such that the music had more transparency and air. The upper end of the spectrum sounded very sweet but not irritating in the slightest. The music just sounded like it was able to breathe and had more effortlessness than before. I was actually quite shocked when I realized how dull my music sounded with the Mimi correction switched off. I kept asking myself, “Was this really the sound I was hearing and settling for before the Mimi test came along?”

This sort of technology, at least as implemented in the FOCAL Bathys, is incredibly important and useful, in so much as it tangibly helps you enjoy the most out of your music. Provided of course you carefully follow the test directions to get the most accurate results. Frankly, it also reset my perspective as an audio reviewer a good bit. If I’m being honest, it sort of shook my confidence in my listening abilities for a good day or two after first experiencing the difference. How reliable were my listening impressions now? I wondered.

In the end, I was reminded that it all comes down to experience and honesty. By having solid points of reference, learning, and understanding the science, and both knowing and appreciating one’s imperfections as they relate to what we hear and what moves us, is what allows us, as reviewers, to do what we do reliably.

So how do these newly energized Focal Bathys compare to my Mark Levinson No.5909? It becomes a much closer comparison than some might expect. Sound-wise the No.5909 still ekes out a more refined midrange quality, particularly where vocals are concerned, that helps distinguish it (at least in my mind) as “the top of the heap”. There is also LDAC codec compatibility that the Bathys lacks if that is an important consideration for you. The last and probably most significant party trick that the Mark Levinson’s can do is be run completely as a passive set of headphones with no battery whatsoever. And they are an exceptional-sounding pair of passive headphones in their own right. The Bathys, as flexible as they are, cannot be run completely passively. Even when using the analog cable, you still must turn them on to get any sound, and for that, you still need battery power.

But the question then becomes, well how important is awesome passive performance to you? When you have a 30+ hour battery life between charges, do you care? And LDAC? Possibly important, depending on the user, but not a dealbreaker I’d imagine. Then there is that $300 price advantage in favor of the Bathys ($699 versus $999). These days, getting your superior sound with a little change left in your pocket is not a small consideration. It’s a competitive market segment and those who are shopping in this bracket need to examine and balance their needs and wants accordingly.

With all that being said, what Focal has done with the Bathys is take what was a desirable headphone and travel companion and make it truly indispensable. Six months of hard wear and use made me appreciate the Bathys as a well-designed set of ANC headphones that I could rely on and enjoy at a moment’s notice. Whether it be for a quick walk around the neighborhood or a 16-hour transatlantic junket. Adding the Mimi hearing compensation over a month ago has been a complete game-changer.

Now with this new update, FOCAL has put every other headphone maker (wired or wireless) on notice. Just how accurate are the headphones you’re listening to, and do you really know what you are missing due to your own hearing limitations? Now, with the updated Focal Bathys, you can legitimately find out for yourself.

Earlier this year when I participated in the Value Electronics Headphone Shootout in New York, all of the judges agreed on how good the Bathys sounded, even putting some wired headphones to shame by comparison. Many of us on the judging panel thought it was only a matter of time before wireless headphones would sound qualitatively indistinguishable from wired ones.

As the saying goes, “Things just got real interesting!”