1982 saw the first Focal inverted dome. A daring design based on a relevant analysis on dome’s behavior: better mechanical coupling, increased efficiency, better control of directivity, more extended frequency response. Twenty years later, this signature has become the symbol of our technological expertise and of our innovation spirit. Since the original glass fiber type, several generations of inverted dome tweeters have followed one another until we reach their ultimate limit in the titanium technology development with the Tioxid 5 tweeter.

So, how to improve on the best from there?

Thanks to pure Beryllium, the inverted dome tweeter has just made a new and possibly its most extraordinary step in its relentless development.

This exceptional material has been well known for a long time as its characteristics reach perfection. Focal has been the first and the only constructor to have introduced the pure Beryllium foil, and this despite all the difficulties to manufacture. The Beryllium cost is about 100 times that of titanium and it is well over the cost of gold. Almost more importantly its very special physical properties make it extremely difficult to work with. To address that daunting challenge and make our dream come true we had to invent a completely new patented manufacturing process.

Beryllium is 7 times stiffer than titanium and aluminum: it is the only metal to scratch glass. It also exhibits high inner damping characteristics, similar to what is encountered in a silk dome. That combined with its extreme lightness makes it a dream material for tweeter dome.

These great properties assembled in a single material result in a frequency range covering 5 octaves, from 1.2kHz to 40kHz, thus making any additional “super tweeter” a thing of the past.

The use of a single drive unit to transcribe the upper frequencies range is allowed by a nearly perfect impulse and an unconditional respect of the phase. That in turn conduces to a degree of coherency never obtained by any other technology until now.

After your first listening of a pure TBe Beryllium tweeter, there won't be no going back to anything else. Its transparency, its definition, its softness and its energy are so ahead of all you have been listening to until now that is addictive.