Introduction

Focal is one of the largest audio brands in the world today, with over 40 years of experience. The French brand is most popular for its speakers and car audio systems, with in-house developed speaker drivers that have been used in flagship audio setups that cost more than most houses do. It took a while for the company to enter the personal audio space with headphones, the Focal Spirit Professional closed-back studio set was released in 2014 and then another closed-back set in the form of the Listen Professional in 2016. However those were quickly overshadowed by the launch of the Focal Utopia—an open-back set using the world’s smallest speaker drivers and pure beryllium diaphragms, to where the Head-fi community was never the same again. I will have more to talk about the Utopia in a separate article, although the subject of today’s review has more to share with the wireless version of the Listen Professional. Dubbed simply the Listen Wireless, Focal’s first foray into Bluetooth headphones had the same mediocre impact as its very first headphones. Would the new iteration mimic the Utopia’s success? Today we take a look at the brand new Focal Bathys Bluetooth ANC headphones to find out.

I had heard about the Bathys earlier this year when someone poked through FCC registration documents to see that Focal was working on a new wireless set. I had also just got done attending CanJam London where I went through the entire active Focal headphone lineup and realized this was a big gap in my own headphones experience. In the absence of a Focal representative who could help with review samples, and also because I was in the market for a personal set of travel headphones anyway, I decided to fork out my own money to purchase the Bathys upon launch. The press release we published had drummed up my interest further, especially when I saw that the drivers used were made in France at the Focal assembly line, and the Bathys was sharing a lot of DNA with the Celestee/Radiance closed-back sets that I had previously listened to and thought they certainly had good potential. With more premium construction and the promise of the Bathys being true audiophile-grade Bluetooth ANC headphones, I placed the order and am now ready to talk more about them after over a month of testing. We begin this review with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications