Focal Aria K2 936 Floorstanding Speaker Review

Focal Aria K2 936 Floorstanding Speaker Introduction

Focal’s Aria loudspeaker line has been around for some years now and has received praise from reviewers and owners alike. Sadly, it wasn’t a loudspeaker series that we had close contact with in the form of a review when it was launched. However, when Focal recently revamped the Arias in the limited-edition K2 series, we decided not to miss out on another opportunity to see what Aria speakers could do and asked Focal to send us a pair. The changes that the limited-edition K2 version of the Arias makes are mostly cosmetic, but the drivers are entirely different with one of the changes being the replacement of the regular Aria’s Flax cones with Focal’s K2 Aramid Fibre Sandwich cones that look to be a bit more advanced. That brings us to the subject of today’s review, the Focal Aria K2 936. These 3-way floor-standing speakers are the big guns of the Aria K2 series and feature three 6.5” bass drivers, a 6.5” midrange driver, and an inverted dome tweeter all set inside of a hefty-sized enclosure with three ports. This model is surely the one that will most fully express what the Aria K2 series is capable of.

Appearance

In my opinion, the Aria K2 936 speakers look very nice, but they won’t be for everyone. In many instances, loudspeakers seem to draw on automobiles for styling cues, and it seems to me that these speakers do that a bit more than most. The Aria K2 936 has a gloss grey finish that Focal calls “Ash Grey.” This is a color that I am seeing becoming popular in automobiles, a grey sometimes called “gunmetal grey,” “concrete,” “stone grey,” etc. As a limited-edition model, the Aria K2 936 speakers only come in this color. The front and back baffle comes in a leatherette finish, a material that looks and feels a lot like real leather but is actually a vinyl imitation. One thing I like about this leatherette material is that it does not catch fingerprints like gloss or smooth satin finishes. The speaker is topped with a glass surface with “Focal” printed underneath the glass at the front edge.

The enclosure has a subtle curvature on the side panels that is imitated in shape by a plinth-type base. The base is made from an aluminum alloy, but it looks like iron. It is a bit more rounded and also gives the speakers a slight backward lean. It uses spiked feet that can be adjusted in height using an included tool.

The stand-out feature of the Aria K2 936 is the bright yellow cones. They serve as quite the contrast with the black/grey surfaces elsewhere on the speaker. With the grilles on, the Aria K2 936 is handsome with a reserved manner. The grilles have a rounded shape that continues the front baffle’s curvature. Without the grilles, the speakers do draw a bit of attention to themselves thanks to the cones, but I like the extra flash that they add. Trim rings surround the drivers and the grilles use magnetic grille guides, so the front baffle has a clean look. The yellow cones with the black dust caps remind me of older BMWs with round headlights. I would not be surprised if BMW enthusiasts were subconsciously drawn to these speakers without realizing that styling cue. With the grilles on, the Aria K2 936 speakers could fit in just about any interior decor due to the muted styling, even despite the somewhat large enclosure, but I think the ungrilled speakers will be a hit or miss for most people, and I don’t think anyone will be on the fence about that aesthetic. 

Design Analysis

The overall design of the Aria K2 936 speakers is not radically different than traditional tower speakers, and they differentiate themselves mostly in the details. The basic design is a three-way tower with three 6.5” bass drivers, a midrange, and a dome tweeter. While that is hardly a revolutionary design, it can be a very good one if executed correctly, and the proper execution lies largely in the details. Now, let’s dive into the details and start at the top with the tweeter.

Focal uses their usual inverted dome shape for the tweeter. Focal claims that the inverted dome shape helps to narrow directivity versus normal convex dome tweeters. It also enables the use of a smaller diameter voice coil fixed directly to the dome, and this should make the moving assembly lighter and more rigid. The tweeter dome itself is made from an aluminum/magnesium alloy which should be stiff enough to maintain its shape up to a very high frequency but light enough to deliver good sensitivity. Focal touts the tweeter’s suspension using a material called “Poron,” an open-cell polyurethane microcellular foam that Focal says has better dimensional stability (and therefore lower distortion) and no degradation over time. The tweeter is mounted in a shallow waveguide that is intended to maximize horizontal directivity while minimizing diffraction.

The midrange driver and bass drivers use the eponymous “K2” cone which is composed of a very light foam layer between a layer of Aramid fibers and a layer of fiberglass. This cone composition should help to tame break-up modes out to a relatively high frequency. Break-up modes are how the cone bends out of shape when it moves at frequencies that are too high for it to maintain a uniform shape. This is a serious problem in loudspeaker design because when the cone starts to deform, it can produce some very ugly sounds and ruin the fidelity of the sound. As cones become larger, the frequencies at which break-up modes occur become lower, and the Aria K2 936 has a relatively large midrange 6.5” cone along with a high crossover frequency of 3.1kHz, so it will be very important that measures are taken to keep break-up modes out of audible bands before the tweeter takes over.

With a large midrange cone, the K2 936 should have pretty good sensitivity and dynamic range in the midrange’s frequency band. Add to that the three 6.5” bass drivers, which have a combined area slightly greater than an 11” cone, and this speaker should not be lacking in dynamics, especially in such a good-sized enclosure. The enclosure itself has three ports. There are two front-firing ports and a larger-diameter down-firing one. All three ports are flared on both ends. The down-firing port has a 3 ¾” depth with a 2 ½” diameter, and the front-firing ports have a 6” depth with a 2” diameter. I would have guessed that the difference in ratio between the shape of these ports means that they will have different resonant frequencies with the down-firing port having a higher resonant frequency than the front-firing ports, but Focal says that the down-firing port actually has a lower tuning frequency than the front-firing ports.

The bass drivers are crossed over to the midrange at 260Hz, and the midrange crosses over to the tweeter at 3.1kHz, and that gives the midrange a fairly wide bandwidth, although Focal does not disclose the slopes of the filters. This keeps the phase rotation of crossover filters out of much of the vocal range, and that could help to keep a natural sound in singing and speech. Interestingly, Focal does not include the option to bi-amp or bi-wire the driver sections. As regular readers of our reviews will know, this isn’t a bad thing, because it avoids the potential mistakes that many users make when trying to take advantage of that ability. It can often cause more problems than the benefits it can bring. I like the high-torque binding posts that Focal uses. They make it very easy to get a tight fit on a bare wire connection.

The weighty aluminum base does a good job of planting the speaker to the floor, and these would not be very easy to tip over despite their height. As was mentioned before, they are slightly angled back, but the spiked feet can be adjusted by an included spanner to change the angle. That adjustability also means that they can be changed so all four feet can rest evenly on an irregular floor surface. There are rubber pads on the bottom of the base, so the base can rest on the floor without the spiked feet if the user doesn’t want to use the feet. There are also spiked feet covers in case the user wants to use the feet but wants something softer than bare metal spikes. The grille is held on by magnetic grille guides and wraps an acoustically transparent fabric over a plastic frame with a hexagonal mesh over the entire area. This grille actually would protect the speakers from a physical impact, but it probably causes some diffraction and wouldn’t do the speaker any favors as far as performance goes, but any acoustic disadvantages brought on by the grille would likely be minor.   

Listening Sessions

In my 24’ by 13’ (approximately) listening room, I set up the speakers with a few feet of stand-off distances between the back wall and sidewall and equal distance between speakers and listening position. I angled the speakers to face my listening position directly. The listening distance from the speakers was about 9 feet. No equalization was used and no subwoofers were used.

Music Listening

Anyone looking for an exquisite vocal recording can rely on the Korean jazz vocalist Youn Sun Nah’s albums, and that is what I did to get a sense of the Aria K2 936’s capability in this regard. Her 2010 release “Same Girl” mainly covers a diverse spread of songs from the likes of Rogers & Hammerstein, Metallica, Sergio Mendes, and Randy Newman, but she also performs a couple of her own compositions. Her covers of these other artists are anything but a simple rehash; she very much makes them her own She has the range and control over her voice to competently take her singing into any emotional territory, and her raw talent has earned her a whole slew of international awards and accolades as well as a host of albums from top European jazz labels. I streamed this finely-produced album from Qobuz at a 24-bit/88.4kHz resolution. 

The first track is a minimal cover of “My Favorite Things” that only has Sun Nah’s singing accompanied by a kalimba, and the K2 936 rendered her voice with nearly clinical precision. Her voice was anchored dead center in the soundstage, so much so that I think this track could serve as a center image check test much like a monoaural white noise. Subsequent tracks brought in a full jazz band, and through the K2 936s, I could hear that the individual instruments were largely recorded in the near field. Sun Nah’s wild singing in the track “Breakfast in Baghdad” proved to be a superlative demonstration of not just her talent but also the K2 936’s ability to failthfully reproduce a vocalist of such enormous range and energy. It’s hard to believe that the same person sings the track “Song of No Regrets,” a sorrowful tune that exudes dejection. Her masterful rendition of “Enter the Sandman” proved that she could be the next Grace Slick if she wanted. Throughout all of these tracks, the K2 936 speakers gave a revealing account of her voice but not through sibilance or any excess treble that I could discern. It was simply the aural detail that can be had from a well-crafted recording and a correctly balanced audio system. Accompanying instruments were also relayed with the same neutral, realistic presentation as Sun Nah’s voice. A gorgeous acoustic guitar on “La Chanson d’helene” was given a close examination in its solo on the K2 936 speakers, and that was very much a worthwhile exit track for this terrific album. 

Acclaimed neoclassical composer Max Richter released a brilliant album a decade ago with his ‘recompositions’ of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” These recompositions were like a remix of the famous “Four Season” that retained basic melodies or in some cases the echo of a melody from the original works but places them into new song structures. Richter has recently returned to this idea again in the 2022 release “The New Four Seasons” which applies the same ideas but takes them in different directions. While some people have complained that this is a butchery of Vivaldi’s music, the original “Four Seasons” are such a well-known and over-used staple of classic repertoire that these rearrangements are the best thing to happen to these familiar concertos in a long time. “The New Four Seasons” is meticulously produced and released by Deutsche Grammophon, and I streamed it from Qobuz in a 24-bit-96kHz resolution.  

On the first track, violins and violas danced on top of slow-building piano and woodwind foundation, and the contrast between these sections was beautifully articulated by the K2 936. The details of the higher-pitched strings were meticulously reproduced without becoming overly sharp. These strings do sound a bit different than traditional orchestral strings, and the reason for that is Richter opted to use period stringed instruments even though these compositions are quite modern (or at least have been modernized). The result is a more forward string section that glides over the more bass-weighted conventional orchestral sections. At times Richter also brings in a classic Moog synthesizer to add a touch of futurism to the sound pallet. Richter also clashes old with new with his prominent use of a harpsichord in some tracks, and its unique sound was reproduced with a striking lucidity on the K2 936 speakers. Through the acoustic cues heard on these speakers, the album could very clearly be heard to be performed on a soundstage rather than a symphonic hall. The performance wasn’t as spread out in sound as would be heard in a normal symphonic hall, and the performers occupied a more defined position with less reverberant ambiance than would be heard in a symphonic hall. This gave the album a sound similar to that of an orchestral score for a movie rather than attending a live performance. Perhaps that is just as well since the vast majority of orchestral music is heard as scores for film, television, and video games these days, and so neoclassical music would more properly reflect the way in which orchestral music is heard by modern listeners. This isn’t to say that is a bad thing; it is simply different, and it can still sound great, especially if heard on really good speakers like the K2 936s.

For something on the more eccentric and wholly artificial side of music (and I do not use the word artificial in any pejorative way), I queued up an album from Death’s Dynamic Shroud entitled, “I’ll Try Living Like This.” While Death’s Dynamic Shroud is associated with the genre of Vaporwave, their music is far too inventive to be pigeonholed into any one genre. This music is like pouring pop music through a blender gone haywire, and while madness emerges from the end, there is still a method to it that makes it eminently listenable. It isn’t music for everyone, but those who can appreciate its melodic mutilation of traditional R&B and pop music may want to give it a spin on a high-fidelity system to see what it can sound like with content on the very opposite side of realism.

The soundstage, insofar as such a thing exists in music like this, is like normal studio pop music caught in a whirlwind of bizarre samples. On a pair of headphones, it sounds like listening in the eye of the storm, but the K2 936 speakers presented it in front of me, like being seated in the front row at an IMAX theater. It was still a dizzying experience but more graspable than being thrown into pop music chaos. There is some thick bass in “I’ll Try Living Like This,” and the K2 936 could stomp out the fatter basslines and beats with subwoofer-like authority. There is no doubt that these speakers had some real low-frequency muscle. Track 5 overlays a low-fi library instrumental piece with vocals taken from the mind of someone dying from an overdose of LSD, and I had to laugh at the end result when reproduced from these high-fidelity Focal loudspeakers. Every digital studio plug-in effect imaginable is deployed on this album, usually simultaneously, and on the K2 936s, it was like being a kid at a candy store. The K2 936s were able to keep the many layers of sound elements distinct, and as strange as the music could get at times, the sounds didn’t become mired in a confused mess. A lesser speaker might not have been able to differentiate the low-fi sampled elements from some of the heavily processed synth sounds. “I’ll Try Living Like This” was a lot of fun to hear on the K2 936 speakers. It shows that while hi-fi speakers can reproduce traditional acoustic recordings with realism, they can also make the stranger types of music shine thanks to the clarity, tonal balance, and dynamic range that benefits all music.

Keeping on the experimental side of music but from a very different angle, one album I listened to with the Aria K2 936 speakers was the original soundtrack for the movie “Hereditary.” 2018’s Hereditary was one of the most starkly horrific movies to come out in recent years, and the music played a larger part than most people realize in achieving this effect. The score was created by Colin Stetson who decided to avoid the usual tropes of the genre and didn’t use any straining strings or synthesizer drones. Instead, he relied largely on woodwinds and brass but used them in an unusual fashion to create a truly unique orchestral score. The result is unnerving and striking, and this album certainly doesn’t need the accompanying movie to create a sense of unease. Anyone looking to see how new sounds can be made from traditional instruments should give this album a listen.

The “Hereditary” score pushed woodwind instruments into their lowest octaves; in fact, the woodwinds provide much of the bass here, and the Aria K2 936 speakers were able to vividly express this unusual texture. Stetson, who is mainly known as an alto and bass saxophone player, unsurprisingly does use quite a bit of saxophone in the music, but that would come as a surprise to anyone who didn’t already know that since nothing in this music sounds anything like a normal saxophone. Much of this music is made from different types of clarinets, but again, one would never guess from just hearing the music. Stetson makes these traditional instruments sound utterly alien, and the K2 936 could evocatively communicate this effect. Some tracks are underlined by a pulsating deep bass sound, and the speakers reproduced the bass with an almost visceral potency. Some instruments held a strong center image in the soundstage while others were mixed to span outward to cover a broad swath, and the K2 936 speakers were able to provide precise imaging as well as an expansive, enveloping sound when it was called for. Much like the movie that it scores, the “Hereditary” soundtrack is not a pleasant experience but is still enjoyable due to the artistry involved. Such artistry is most fully expressed on a good sound system, and the Aria K2 936 speakers proved to be a very worthy part of such a sound system.

Movie Watching

It has been a long time since I have been as excited to watch a television show as when HBO’s “We Own This City” had been announced. One of my all-time favorite television shows was “The Wire,” and this show looked to be something of a successor to “The Wire,” since it was about Baltimore law enforcement and was made by the same creative team. As far as tests of dialogue intelligibility go, it looked to be a very good one since the showrunners insist on authentic Baltimore accents and slang, and it can sometimes be a bit tricky for a non-native to follow. And being an HBO production, the sound mix should be of the highest production quality that a television show can have. Now that all six episodes are available at the same time I had the Aria K2 936 speakers, I figured now would be a good time to binge this show. 

“We Own This City” met my high expectations of it, and the K2 936 speakers turned out to be a great choice for experiencing this show. It is crucially important that the sound system be very good in dialogue intelligibility for this show, and the K2 936s were very good indeed. Every single F-bomb was beautifully lucid, and I had no trouble understanding anything that was said. The music was largely diegetic with bar music or car stereos playing in the background with the exception of the opening titles and end credits. The sound mix was clean and down to Earth, and the effects noises were mostly just sounds from routine city life except for moments of police action such as household raids or peeling tires of patrol cars. Certainly one could get by with a lesser sound system for following this drama, but a good sound system like the Aria K2 936 speakers makes it so much more immersive. “We Own This City” turned out to be a terrific show, and anyone looking for something engrossing to binge on ought to check it out.

For a sound mix more on the fantastical side, I watched the Netflix production “Gunpowder Milkshake,” an over-the-top action movie about a ruthless lady assassin who decides to protect a child that ended up in the crosshairs of an organized crime syndicate. I had not yet seen this movie, but it looked like it has action scenes so excessive that they become comical. I had heard by word of mouth that “Gunpowder Milkshake” is heavily stylized and wildly violent, so I thought it could be a good choice for demonstrating what the Aria K2 936 speakers could do with a more traditional Hollywood fare.

One thing was clear after having seen “Gunpowder Milkshake,” and that was the Aria K2 936 speakers were not light on bass. The audio was as stylized as the video, so the action scenes had a much heavier emphasis on bass than was realistic, and this was not lost on the K2 936 speakers. Every gunshot had a meaty thump as did every punch, kick, and body slam. A car chase in an underground parking garage also evidenced the dynamic range of the speakers with a fair amount of tire squeals, revving motors, and collisions that echoed in the reverberant acoustics of the facility. In some moments, classic pop music was played over the action scenes which did mute their dynamics a bit, but it was still fun to watch the bloodbath set to some golden oldies. The original music was a traditional orchestral score that didn’t really attempt to do more than set the mood of the scenes, but it still sounded full on the K2 936s. The movie wasn’t much more than a justification for John Wick-styled violence with a feminine angle, but that was all that it promised to be, and indeed, that was what it delivered. Action movie fans should check it out if they haven’t already done so, and they should do it with speakers that won’t compress the dynamics or compromise the clarity of the sound. The Focal Aria K2 936 speakers proved to be a good fit with this movie.

Focal Aria K2 936 Floorstanding Speaker Measurements and Conclusion

The Focal Aria K2 936 speakers were measured in free-air at a height of 4 feet at a 2-meter distance from the microphone, with the microphone raised to an 8’ elevation that was level with and aimed at the tweeter center. The measurements were gated at 9 milliseconds. In this time window, some resolution is lost below 400 Hz and accuracy is completely lost below 200 Hz. Measurements have been smoothed at a 1/24 octave resolution.

The above graphs depict the K2 936’s direct-axis and horizontal dispersion out to a 90-degree angle in five-degree increments. Information on how to interpret these graphs can be read in our loudspeaker measurement article. This is another very good showing from Focal with a terrific on-axis response and good off-axis correspondence. The response shown here stays within a 4dB window, making this a nicely neutral speaker on-axis. As we go off-axis, we do get into a slight directivity mismatch between the tweeter and the midrange where we can see the tweeter broaden the dispersion a bit above 2.5kHz, but that only starts to occur at a fairly far off-axis angle, and it isn’t a severe directivity mismatch. We do see the tweeter begin to narrow its dispersion sharply above 10kHz, as is typical of many dome tweeters, but that won’t have a very major effect on the sound since there isn’t much program material with significant content up to that band.

The above graph zooms in on some of the individual responses measured on the horizontal axis. We are taking a closer look at these to see what specific angles hold the most neutral response. The most neutral response actually comes from the range of 10 degrees to 20-degrees on the horizontal axis rather than the on-axis angle, so this speaker would ideally be angled with a mild toe-in to face inward but not so much as to directly face the listener, at least for those interested in being met with the most accurate direct sound. Moving out 10 degrees further than that, whether to the on-axis response or 30-degree angle still yields a good response although not quite as flat across the entire frequency range. This speaker should sound tonally balanced over a wide listening area, but the listening position at the 15-degree angle is probably what perfectionists should be aiming for in the placement and positioning of these speakers.

The above polar map shows the same information in the preceding graphs but depicts it in a way that can offer new insight regarding these speakers’ behavior. Instead of using individual raised lines to illustrate amplitude, polar maps use color to portray amplitude, and this allows the use of a purely angle/frequency axis perspective. The advantage of these graphs is they can let us see broader trends of the speaker’s dispersion behavior more easily. More information about interpreting this graph can be read in our loudspeaker measurement article.

The above graph tells us that the K2 936 has a fairly wide dispersion and can be listened to out to a 60-degree angle off-axis without losing much energy aside from upper treble above 10kHz. We also get a better look at how the tweeter puffs out its dispersion a bit compared to the midrange driver, but I don’t think it is significant enough to add any major coloration to the sound for an in-room response. Those who don’t want to miss out on any upper treble above 10kHz should be listening within a 20-degree angle of the tweeter’s direct aim. Overall, while this dispersion pattern is not absolutely perfect, it is very good.

The above graph is a sampling of some of the vertical angle responses at and around the on-axis angle. Negative degrees indicate angles below the tweeter, positive angles indicate angles above the tweeter, and zero degrees is level with the tweeter. As would be expected, the height level with the tweeter produces the evenest response overall. Unfortunately, at a 44” height, the tweeter is mounted a bit high in the K2 936, and the least even response here occurs at a lower angle, ten degrees below the tweeter. Given the tweeter height, it is very possible that many people could be listening at this suboptimal angle if they have low-slung seating or are listening at a closer distance, perhaps within ten feet or so. In the product data sheet, Focal advises a 10-12’ listening distance, but that is the only mention I see of a listening distance in Focal’s literature, and that is not listed in the user manual. Something Focal might have done to alleviate this is to swap the positions of the midrange driver and tweeter. That would have brought the tweeter down to a height that more people usually listen. However, as we saw in the individual horizontal responses graph, the responses do flatten out past 10 degrees on the horizontal axis, so all of these responses likely become smoother as we move off-axis a bit. Nonetheless, this speaker benefits from a good distance between the listener or seating that elevates the listener’s ear height to the tweeter’s 44” height.   

The above graph shows the K2 936’s low-frequency response captured using ground-plane measurements (where the speaker and microphone are on the ground at a 2-meter distance in a wide-open area). As can be seen in this measurement, the K2 936 holds a flat response down to 70Hz where it begins a shallow roll-off that doesn’t become a full-blown 24dB/octave slope that ports normally have until 50Hz. Many times we see underdamped ports in tower speakers so that deep bass is not as high in level as the mid-bass, because manufacturers try to compensate for the inevitable room gain which will give a boost to deep bass. However, if that is what is being attempted here, it is happening only to a mild degree, where the deeper-tuned front ports provide some additional deep bass reinforcement, but not at a strong level. I would expect this speaker to have bass in-room down to maybe 40Hz but probably not a whole lot below that point.   

The above graph shows the electrical behavior of the Focal Aria K2 936. Focal specifies this speaker to have a nominal impedance of 8 ohms, and that seems like a stretch. This is very much a 4-ohm load; in fact, the minima drops well below 4 ohms by my measurement. I would say Focal’s spec is there as reassurance that regular AVRs can handle this load. They probably could, but with a steep phase angle at the minima at around 100Hz, a very heavily used frequency, I wouldn’t want to crank these speakers on any AVR that cheaped out on the amplifier section. These speakers should be used with a stout amplifier, but, at $6.6k per pair, they very likely will be. The dip in the low-frequency ‘saddle’ that is always seen in ported loudspeakers occurs at just under 40Hz which indicates its tuning frequency. The mismatch of the saddle ridges indicates that the resonant frequency of the bass drivers is very different from that of the enclosure, and I would guess that the higher-tuned down-firing port is behind this disparity.

I tested the sensitivity to be 91.9dB for 1 meter at 2.83v which is a very close match for Focal’s 92dB specification. These are fairly sensitive speakers that don’t need huge wattage to get loud. As a large, ported speaker with three 6.5” bass drivers, a 6.5” midrange driver, and a 1” dome tweeter, the K2 936 was bound to be on the sensitive side. They will be able to handle a lot of power too, so these speakers should be able to get pretty loud if supplied with enough power.

Conclusion

Before bringing this review to a close, I will briefly go over the strengths and weaknesses of the product under consideration, and, as usual, I will start with the weaknesses. The good news about the bad news for the Focal Aria K2 936 is that there isn’t much bad news to report here. This product doesn’t have any serious shortcomings, but there are two situational caveats that buyers should be aware of. One caveat is, as was discussed before, the height of the tweeter means this speaker is not the best choice for those who plan to listen at a relatively close distance. I would recommend listeners stay within a five-degree angle of the tweeter height for this speaker, and with a 44” tweeter height and the average ear height of a seated adult being between thirty to thirty-five inches, that means listeners would want to have about a three-meter distance from the speaker. Of course, a higher seating position will enable the listener to sit closer and still be in an optimal height range for the speaker, but a lower seating position will require one to have a greater distance for an optimal height. The K2 936 will still sound fine at angles not too far outside of five degrees of the tweeter, but it will sound best in that five-degree angle.

Something else to be aware of is that with a 40Hz port tuning frequency, this isn’t the deepest digging tower speaker despite its size. The lowest audible octave for human hearing is widely considered 20Hz-40Hz (although some research indicates that human hearing can perceive significantly deeper frequencies), so users interested in very deep bass will want to add a subwoofer with this speaker. It seems like a speaker this large should be able to dig down to 30Hz or so, but this one does not. Its lack of low-frequency extension does enable it to achieve a relatively high-sensitivity, and good subwoofers can be had these days for not a lot of extra money, so I don’t consider this a serious problem, but it is something that should be noted for anyone who might be expecting the K2 936 to tackle some heavy subterranean bass.

With those quibbles out of the way, let’s go over the many strengths of the K2 936s. The first is that the sound quality can be outstanding. They do take some placement tweaking to achieve that sound, but once you have it, it sounds terrific. With the right positioning, you can get a near-ruler flat response with these speakers for a superbly accurate sound. The soundstage can be both precise and expansive, and the speakers had no trouble imaging the intended locations of the sounds. The bass is punchy without being overbearing, and while it won’t do much below 40Hz, that level of extension covers all acoustic music except for some pipe organ recordings, and the vast majority of electronic music as well. The K2 936 speakers have a very good dynamic range, so if you are looking for something that won’t compress the peaks of orchestral crescendoes or you just want a speaker that can rock hard, they are a terrific choice.

Many aspects of practical engineering are quite well thought-out. Their low impedance does mean that users will want to run them on amps that are comfortable with 4-ohm loads, but their high sensitivity means that they don’t need a ton of wattage to get loud. The grille is stylish but also practical in that it truly protects the drivers from damage while being easy to remove. The high-torque binding posts make it easy to get a tight squeeze on bare-wire or spade connections; I wish more manufacturers would use binding posts like these. I also appreciate that Focal decided to forego dual binding posts for bi-amping or bi-wiring; bi-amping is not done often enough to be worth the inclusion, and in many instances, it can be misused and end up screwing up the sound. The K2 936 is a tall speaker but the aluminum base firmly plants the floor, and it wouldn’t be knocked over easily. The K2 936s also give the user options for how they want the speakers to contact the floor: rubber pads on the base, spiked metal feet, or soft spike covers. Furthermore, the user can adjust the height of the feet individually.

While styling is very much a matter of individual taste, I do think that the Aria K2 936s look cool. They certainly have a high-performance European automotive flair. They would make a better aesthetic fit in a modernist interior decor than a traditional one. The build quality is also very good, and these speakers have a solid feel befitting their luxury product class. Rapping on the side of the enclosure with your knuckles produces an inert thump instead of a resonant knocking sound. They look and feel like the pricey speakers that they are, and no one who buys these is going to feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Taking a long view of the performance and size of the Focal Aria K2 936s, they are best for larger rooms. They are a tall and powerful speaker with a high acoustic center. They would be terrific for a two-channel system in a room with an open floor plan. You could also use these to power a dedicated home theater pretty easily, and they would work very well with tiered seating. If you are looking for a high-end speaker for any kind of large room, they are a great choice. I like them, but sadly I only have one room in my home large enough for them to work well. Were I outfitting that room with a permanent set of speakers, the Aria K2 936s would be very high on my list of contenders.

The Score Card

The scoring below is based on each piece of equipment doing the duty it is designed for. The numbers are weighed heavily with respect to the individual cost of each unit, thus giving a rating roughly equal to:

Performance × Price Factor/Value = Rating

Audioholics.com note: The ratings indicated below are based on subjective listening and objective testing of the product in question. The rating scale is based on performance/value ratio. If you notice better performing products in future reviews that have lower numbers in certain areas, be aware that the value factor is most likely the culprit. Other Audioholics reviewers may rate products solely based on performance, and each reviewer has his/her own system for ratings.

Audioholics Rating Scale

• — Excellent
• — Very Good
• — Good
• — Fair
• — Poor

Metric	Rating
Build Quality
Appearance
Treble Extension
Treble Smoothness
Midrange Accuracy
Bass Extension
Bass Accuracy
Imaging
Dynamic Range
Fit and Finish
Performance
Value