Focal Mu-so Hekla Review

Design

The Focal Mu-so Hekla is big – so big that if you are intending to mate this with a TV rather than have it on its own, your TV is going to have to hang on a wall with the Focal sitting below it. Those promotional photos aren’t a lie – it’s just too tall to fit between a TV, and you’ll want to pair the Hekla with a big TV as well. This is the type of speaker that’s more fitting for big rooms.

Another reason to wall-mount is the lovely control dial, which lights up like previous efforts in the Mu-so family but in doing can cast a reflective glow on the screen. Not great for immersion.

It also expels a fair amount of heat from its back, the electronics keep the Hekla rather warm and toasty, though it won’t be a substitute for your central heating. The ridges around the side and back are also sharper than you might expect – lifting and carrying the speaker is not an act you’d want to do often.

But despite being something of a slab of speaker, it’s a well-built, distinctive and stylish-looking slab of a speaker nonetheless. I love the dial – its main use is to turn the volume up or down, as well as going through and selecting setting options; the smoothness of the rotation and the little clicks of feedback give it a tactile feel that an app wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

But the question is whether you’d actually get up from the comfort of your couch and use it particularly often – it’s ornate and looks spectacular, but the app is where most of the operation will be conducted from. It doesn’t help that from a seated position you can’t see the display anyway.

This is a speaker that looks premium and certainly weighs it as well. From the fabric grille that covers the front (which can be detached but there’s no movement yet on producing customisable grilles). The two-tone black/silver finish isn’t the most colourful, but the toned-down, minimalist approach to design helps the Focal stand out.

The Focal Mu-so Hekla’s design verges on being impractical in a way but that, in a sense, is what stands out about it. You build your set-up around it rather than slot it in.

Features

• Focal/Naim app
• AirPlay and Google Cast streaming
• ADAPT Room Setup

Connections can be found around the rear of the speaker, and amount to an HDMI, digital optical out, RCA sub/AUX output and Ethernet.

HDMI is obviously for connection to a TV, though digital optical seems to be losing its way with soundbars, for the Mu-so Hekla’s designation as a music system, it provides more options to connect other devices (CD players?). If you want more bass then the wired sub output can supply that.

The Focal Mu-so Hekla supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and with the former that provides a slew of wireless options, from Google Cast to Tidal Connect, AirPlay, Qobuz Connect, Spotify Connect, servers and more that can be accessed through the Focal/Naim app.

The app, visually, looks simple but does offer a more granular degree of customisation should you want to down that route. You can swap between the modes, a choice of Sphere Music/Movie and Dolby Music/Movie; adjust the settings of source inputs, flick between sources and presets. The app has built in Internet Radio as another source you can feed the Hekla.

You can also optimise the Hekla through the app by using the ADAPT Room Setup, although this feature is not automatic and requires manual input. You’ll need to measure the space (so prepare the tape measure), and enter the measurements, which are quite far-reaching.

I wasn’t expecting to measure how far the speaker is from each wall, as well as to the ceiling and seating position. Sony’s Bravia Trio performs a similar act but it’s not quite as involved and is faster to complete. It’s a process that’s on the cumbersome side but likely worth once you reap the results at the end of it.

Sound Quality

• Scale and heft to its sound
• Convincingly natural midrange
• Big bass for an all-in-one

Initial impressions of the Focal Mu-so Hekla serve up an important lesson. Initially it sounds slightly crisp but also thing, a deliver of Phil Collins’ Against All Odds that’s clear and spacious but also slightly echoey. It turns out that I’m in the Sphere Music setting that’s designed for spatial audio content and upmixes stereo content to sound immersive.

So be sure that you’re in the right mode or you may find, like I did, that there’s something slightly off. For stereo music, Dolby Music is the preferred mode, and it’s not as thin-sounding or stretched as the Sphere Music – though Sphere Music has its own qualities, mainly in prescribing tracks with a sense of depth and pushing the track up and away from the speaker.

What I like about the Mu-so Hekla is its sense of control and tone. The highs are bright and clear but are conveyed in a natural manner – there’s no sense of the Mu-so Hekla sounding overly sharp or fatiguing in its reproduction of treble notes.

The midrange performance is cracking – vocals are so convincingly natural, the tone the Hekla strikes is neutral for the most part though that can depend on your streaming service of choice. I find Qobuz to be sharper and crisper than Tidal, which is slightly warmer, and music played over Qobuz Connect can often give way to sounding a little too crisp and sharp and the volume needs to be turned down a notch. The Hekla ladles the midrange with detail and clarity – no track I play through it ever sounds muddled, obscured or disorganised.

Consistency in its approach might be its greatest asset, and often I find that consistency can make music sound one and the same, bordering on humdrum. But the more I listen to music on the Hekla, the more I want to hear how it plays with other tracks and time in the company of the Focal often slips away.

The power of the Mu-so Hekla hits hard – even at half volume, the Hekla emits a room-shaking sound in inspiration of the volcano it’s named after. It can easily go big and loud – the only question is whether you have enough room to contain its sound. The bass response for what is a one-box system is very convincing: weighty, measured and balanced – if I had a nitpick, I could argue for a weightier sound, but the clarity and power summoned by the low end without spoiling the midrange performance or overall tone of the sound is impressive.

Moving to the Sphere Music side of things and a play of Michael Jackson’s Human Nature and Annete Ashvik’s Liberty and both tracks come across with more depth, more scale and a bigger sense of spaciousness. Rather than the music coming directly from the speaker, it’s taller, wider and music comes from around the speaker than delivered from it.

Immersive tracks take on a smoother tone – which could just be an attribute of immersive mixes anyway – it’s not as crisp and sounds softer but still clear, still detailed with good amounts of bass, though the strength of the bass does not feel quite as powerful as it does in stereo. But the tone of immersive is very much the same – Sphere Music doesn’t feel like a step down from stereo – just a different way to listen to music.

How does it sound with TV? I plug in Sky Glass Air, and a play of HBO’s Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and the Focal automatically switches to its Dolby Movie mode. Dialogue is mostly clear despite the various accents that pepper the show, the only concern is that it can sound slightly boomy at times. The Mu-so Hekla takes a beefy approach to the bass – the entrance of the HBO logo at the start seems to thunder from the speaker.

The bass power makes itself know with Steven Spielberg’s rendition of West Side Story; while with Blade Runner 2049 the Hekla almost goes overboard with the low frequencies to the point where it does affect the midrange and dialogue a little – this is all in the Sphere Movie mode.

The bass in this mode slightly overplays its hand – Dolby Movie sounds more natural – but even so, I can’t hear any distortion aside from the ceiling of the test room given the rattle.

In terms of the width of the soundstage, it’s big with mother!, extending the width far beyond the width of the speaker itself and reaching across the room with voices almost a metre away from where the speaker is placed. And with its upfiring speaker the height channels are present as K’s spinner descends from above and onto Sapper’s farm.

It’s a big, energetic and punchy performance, though is it truly immersive? Without rear channel support I wouldn’t say so but does produce a bubble of sound in front if you.

Lastly, I give the Focal Mu-so Hekla a spin in its Bluetooth mode, which surprisingly for £3000 music system, translates to AAC streaming. It isn’t as detailed, sounds warmer but bass remains rich and powerful, highs slightly crisper and the Hekla’s approach to music is smoother. Given the outlay, I might expect the Bluetooth performance to be even better but it’s solid, although solid does feel ordinary for a system that hits the highs that this can.

Should you buy it?