Focal Shape 40 2-Way Powered Studio Monitor - EACH

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Shape 40 monitors can be used from 23″ away, and they have astonishingly extended low end frequency response.  Whether you have a room of less than 107ft2, or a compact installation, Shape 40 is the perfect solution.

The bass register is articulated and controlled. The lower mid-range and mid-range benefit from extreme neutrality, and without any masking effects, making equalization of these essential registers much easier. The tweeter efficiently reveals any hissing, and is also very precise in the very high end.

Flax Sandwich Cone

Flax cones are characterized by their natural sound, with low coloration, their richness of reproduction in the midrange register and their tighter bass.

Flax cones are made of high-quality flax fibers core enclosed by two thin layers of glass fiber. They satisfy the key criteria of a high performance diaphragm: high internal damping, high velocity of sound and high flexural rigidity.

Flax is twice as light as fiberglass, because the fiber is hollow. It also has very low elasticity which makes it ideal to increase the flexural rigidity of a sandwich structure. It can be obtained in non-woven bundles of considerable diameter and it can therefore produce the thickness required for a sandwich.

Internal Damping

Composite materials have properties suitable for applications where both rigidity and low mass are required. However, their disadvantage is that they lack damping, which leads to very poor control of vibrations. Recent developments in this field combining composites and natural fibers have brought unexpected opportunities. Flax fiber has an excellent internal damping of the same order of magnitude as the glass or Kevlar fibers or aluminum.

Stabilizing The Magnetic Field

The magnetic field is not stable because it is modulated by three factors:

• The movement of the voice coil (Lenz's law)
• The current passing through it (Foucault current)
• The frequency

Consequently, the voice coil, and all the moving part including the cone, is in the magnetic field which becomes too variable, and this leads to loss of precision.

Neutral Inductance Circuit Technology

The solution, NIC technology, lies in a Faraday ring whose dimensions, materials and positioning were optimized to make the magnetic field no longer affected by the position of the voice coil, by the amperage or the frequency of the current passing through it.

The Obsession With The Midrange

The midrange register is no doubt the most complicated to control in a sound system. On one hand, there must be a smooth transition with the bass. On the other hand, it must be tuned to the tweeter in terms of dispersion and acceleration. This determines the homogeneity of the timbre and spatialization.

Tuned Mass Damper

The solutions already known for increasing the damping properties of the suspension all result in an increase of the mass which consequently alters definition. The answer came from a technology used in earthquake-resistant skyscrapers and which is also used for the suspension on racing cars! This technology is called a "Tuned Mass Damper": an additional mass oscillate in opposition to the resonance frequency to control it.

Applied to the speaker driver, the solution consists in simply two tubular rings on the suspension whose dimensions and position have been judiciously determined. They form our Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) and they stabilize the dynamic behavior of the surround according to resonance, thus avoiding deformation of the cone without afflicting the dynamics.