[emrelights1973]

I publish the pictures in Naim forum, I hope you don't mind, thank you for fast news

 

[RustyGates]

Geez USD 4k? Utopia prices? I understand its a Beryllium driver, but its build is nothing like the Utopia, very similar to the Elegia, albeit difference colour scheme.

 

[mwr2700]

Found this on Reddit and it gave me a chuckle.

 

[Tsukuyomi]

I'm a kid again ... Love it!
At the risk of dating myself ... I'm going to work hard so I can wear this one day!

so thats "project S" its called Stellia huh. interesting.
and i guess i was absolutely wrong, it is closed back. dam, and 4,000$... steep very very steep. because there are a lot of very very good closed backs for less that this model will be directly competing against.

 

[up late]

Geez USD 4k? Utopia prices? I understand its a Beryllium driver, but its build is nothing like the Utopia, very similar to the Elegia, albeit difference colour scheme.

too early to tell imo but i expect that there will be other points of difference between the stellia and elegia

 

[up late]

so thats "project S" its called Stellia huh. interesting.
and i guess i was absolutely wrong, it is closed back. dam, and 4,000$... steep very very steep. because there are a lot of very very good closed backs for less that this model will be directly competing against.

yeah but it might be da bomb

 

[PeteSTRADAMUS]

Found this on Reddit and it gave me a chuckle.

This kind of creativity makes me want to buy a pair lol

 

[AmusedToD]

So the Stellia is definitely a closed back Utopia in a way that it uses “frameless 100% copper voice coil and ‘M’-shaped pure Beryllium dome”.

If the open back Utopia has a small sound stage, this thing could be claustrophobic. Just guessing...

 

[PeteSTRADAMUS]

But the driver design is different, the magnets look different. I guess we can only wait for our own personal listen.

 

[jonstatt]

$3k at Moon Audio

 

[Arniesb]

If stellia cost 3k and have much better accesories then why Utopia still cost 4k euro everywhere on Europe? Makes no sense...

 

[emrelights1973]

so we have a closed back Utopia now, what the hell they change the connectors.... so we can not use our Utopia cable and buy new ones....

it is time for a headphone connector adaptors.... stellia ones female utopia ones males sold under 99USD max... common Kimber

 

[montanari]

today i listen the utopia with a bunch of amplifier
best match with the ear hp4, i liked them very much from this amp, the th900 even more
probably is it true that the best matching amp is something with valves

 

[JimL11]

Sorry but I don't know if you can play any instrument (I guess no, you would write such an heresy : "it doesn't matter how good a musician he is"), your tastes (BTW, a good match has nothing to do with tastes), what you find to be a good match, you post is meaningless. "Jascha Heifetz is said..." but without knowing "who said he said", this is also 100% meaningless.

Wrong. I play the piano, but I am an amateur, not a professional. That fact doesn't make me my opinions either more or less significant. A lot of musicians are not particularly wealthy, so they spend their money on their instruments, not their stereo. And a lot of them are able to live with that because their mind can make up for what their system is missing. So they are not necessarily an authority on what good reproduction should sound like. Doesn't mean they are wrong, but doesn't mean they are right, either.

A good match DOES have to do with tastes. What one person considers "real" is not necessarily what another considers real. What a musician hears playing an instrument is not necessarily what the same instrument sounds like from the point of view of the audience. The conductor George Szell was notorious for demanding that the treble in his recordings be boosted. Then a record producer visited him at home and discovered he had placed his speakers behind the couch, which blocked all the highs. True story. Some soloists think what sounds real is a recording where the soloist is up front and the orchestra sounds like it is in the next county - because that is what they hear in concert - but it's not what the audience hears.

Some people at a concert prefer to sit in the back, some prefer to sit in the front, and some prefer to sit in the middle. The tonal balance, the blending of the orchestra, etc., differ at all those locations. I once sat in the upper balcony at Boston Symphony Hall at a concert, and the orchestra sounded like it was covered with a blanket, compared to what I'm used to. But that was a real orchestra in a real hall. Probably not what I would have heard in the first row, though.

The point is that just because someone is a fine musician doesn't necessarily make them an authority on reproduced music. Doesn't disqualify them either. But you haven't answered my point, which is that without context, your musician friend's comments still don't mean any more than anyone else's comments.

Now, if you were to say that your friend has such and such a system, which he considers to produce a realistic sound, then we could make a better judgment. Or even if you could say what he considers a good match for the Utopia, that would be much more informative than a blanket statement with no context. Something like, he does not consider amp X a good match with the Utopia because...., or he does consider amp Y a good match of the Utopia because... That's what I mean, that's what I'm looking for.

 

[llamaluv]

I wonder who the OEM for the Focal branded dac/amp is.

The press materials say Micromega.