Yes, we did no such thing with the LUNA. Our audio engineer merely bought the Utopia because it is seen as a major benchmark in the headphone world, and the fact that it utilized a beryllium diaphragm made it an easy choice. It was used for listening tests (and for appreciating all the hard work Focal put into it), and we did not reverse engineer anything. In the real world, in-ears sound quite different from full-sized headphones, with wholly different presentations. Even so, the concept of 'soundstage' or 'headstage' and whether it truly exists with headphones and earphones when compared to speakers is a big topic of contention.
Our main approach for LUNA was to create the most authentic timbre reproduction we could and frame an accurate tonal balance within a relaxing, layered sonic milieu. When we first started the project, Materion showed us a model from which we could work with to quickly produce a working prototype. We didn't go with that design because it only included a central dome that contained the beryllium foil. For us, it was imperative we made the entire surface area responsible for sound reproduction was beryllium. We scrapped the design entirely and created one from the ground up, and this is the design found in the LUNA.
