Legacy Focus 20/20 Excellent Condition

Legacy Audio Focus 20/20 loudspeaker

By Paul Bolin • Posted: Jan 18, 2004 • Published: Jan 1, 2004 I was introduced to Legacy Audio at the CEDIA Expo in September 2002, and I’ll long remember it. A pair of Legacy’s huge new Helix loudspeakers anchored the company’s silent display, and I was irresistibly drawn to them. Sales manager Bob Howard introduced himself, and, after a few minutes of chatting, introduced me to Bill Dudleston, Legacy’s founder and chief designer. Within two minutes, Dudleston had told me "I don’t design speakers for hi-fi people. I design speakers for people who love music."

When you’ve been in the audio press for a few years, you’ve heard rhetoric like this before, but there was something decidedly different in Dudleston’s tone and manner. My interest was snared. After a bit of discussion, Howard, John Atkinson, and I agreed that Legacy’s $6500/pair Focus 20/20 would be an optimal place to begin an investigation of Legacy’s wares. Legacy, by the way, is no Johnny-come-lately to the audio business. Its 20-year history is discussed in the sidebar.

A double-decker (plus)
Bill Dudleston describes the Focus 20/20 as "a satellite and subwoofer in one box, with a transition driver to fill in the crossover range." The extensively reinforced cabinet holds a subchamber for the midrange drivers and tweeters that is itself subdivided, the midranges and tweeters each having their own sealed spaces. All drive-units in that burly cabinet are manufactured to Legacy’s own precise specifications. The Kevlar Hexacone midranges are from Germany’s Eton; Audax supplies the dome tweeter, which has a massive 48-oz magnetic structure; and the ribbon tweeter, sporting a neodymium magnet, is sourced from Foster.

The 12" "transition driver" was designed from the ground up by Dudleston and is made by Eminence, a major supplier of drive-units for the musical-instrument amplifier industry. The two 12" subwoofers, another start-with-a-blank-page Dudleston design, feature a 3" voice-coil, a 1" butyl-rubber surround, and hefty 20-lb magnet structures. An unusual feature of Legacy’s bass drivers is their use of two voice-coils. As the woofer generates back-EMF while reproducing low bass—as much as 50V worth in a Focus subwoofer—when that energy reaches a certain level it is shorted from the first voice-coil to the second, effectively using the woofer’s own energy as a brake on excessive excursion.

The crossover is split between two screened PC boards, which separates the mid and treble sections from the bass sections with their large inductors. Each board hosts tuning turrets, where values of resistors and capacitors can be fine-tuned to match drivers to within 1dB. The internal wiring harness is copper strand of three gauges: 12 gauge from the inputs to the woofers, 14 to the higher-frequency drivers, and 16 to the shunt trimming resistors.

The cabinet is extremely solid and beautifully finished, if not quite as luxuriously as JMlab’s Utopias, the big Wilsons, or Legacy’s own more costly models; four large spikes couple the speaker to the floor. Around back are one of the two 12" subwoofers, the two reflex ports, and a hookup panel equipped with two sets of stout binding posts and three switches. The first of these changes the low-frequency impedance contour when using amplifiers with high current capability. This option, according to Legacy, "converts the Focus from a traditional B4 alignment to a more sophisticated sixth-order Butterworth alignment, thus reducing distortion in the octave above system resonance." Unless the speaker is being driven with a low-powered receiver, Legacy recommends that the leftmost switch be left in the Up, or B6, position.

In its Down position, the middle switch softens the midrange presence, while the rightmost switch provides some subtractive contouring in the lower-treble region, to alleviate room flutter or overly bright recordings. I left all three in their Up/Off positions for all of my listening.

Most speakers have worked well in the same general spot in my listening room, and the Foci were no exception: about 3’ out from the back wall to the back of the cabinet, and 42" from sidewall to tweeter center, and all was well. The Legacys worked best with a bit of toe-in, but most of the side panel was clearly visible from my listening chair.

Defying expectations
Fresh out of their boxes, the Legacy 20/20s caught my ear with their effortlessly robust presentation. The Focus is a big speaker, and the pair of them easily threw life-sized images into the room—presenting the power of a large orchestra in full cry proved silly-easy. Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Suite (CD, Oue/Minnesota Orchestra, Reference Recordings RR87-CD) spread luxuriantly into the room, with firmly grounded bass and the sweetness and clarity that are characteristic of Minneapolis’ Orchestra Hall. Most impressive was the sense of relaxation that the speaker showed on this highly dynamic, very-large-scaled music. The Focuses’ spatial presentation was very deep, but a tad narrower than the best I’ve heard. I expected slightly more top-end extension than was there, but chalked this all up (correctly, I later learned) to the review samples’ spanking-newness. It was soon clear that this was going to be a fun review, so I settled in to let the speakers break in for a few weeks before getting down to any purposeful "review listening."

The transparency and detail resolution of the Focus are comparable to those of speakers costing considerably more. With three 12" drivers operating below 250Hz, I had some concerns that the Focus would sound a little slow, thick, or heavy. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Even with all that air being moved, the Focus was consistently dextrous and well-defined throughout the bass and lower midrange. Frank Zappa’s "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" (CD, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol.6, Rykodisc RCD 19569/70) had great bop and bounce, and the furious complexity of Jaco Pastorius’ tour de force "Donna Lee" (LP, Epic PE 33949) was cleanly and distinctly articulated.

The Focus matched its deftness with power. The raging thunder of John Bonham’s drums on Led Zep’s "Achilles’ Last Stand," from Presence (LP, Swan Song/Classic SS 8416), exhibited great controlled power and explosiveness. With Finlandia (LP, Mackerras/London Proms Orchestra, RCA/Classic LSC-2336), the big brass at the right rear of the stage had superior heft and weightiness and satisfying "blat." In fact, the Legacy’s bass was one of its standout qualities. The careful attention paid to the lowest octaves has resulted in excellence that will extend well down into the low to mid-20Hz region in most rooms of normal size.

The midrange was always very neutral and highly detailed, with vocals being especially well-served. Crispian Mills’ passionate singing on Kula Shaker’s "Great Hosannah," from Peasants Pigs & Astronauts (CD, Columbia CK 69885), and Diana Krall’s mind-foggingly sultry take on "Let’s Face the Music and Dance," from When I Look In Your Eyes (CD, Verve IMPD-304), were near-perfect in every respect. Choral music is one of the most demanding tests, and the Focus handled the challenge very well on the Rachmaninoff Vespers (SACD, PentaTone Classics PTC 5186 027). Voices were nicely individualized, and intelligibility was excellent. (I don’t understand Russian, but I could follow effortlessly along with the libretto.)

The ribbon tweeter offered the special speed and extension of its kind, but, even after extensive break-in, and while certainly not reticent, it was a touch softer at the top of its range than some others I have heard. It’s not an openly euphonic coloration so much as, I suspect, a deliberate design choice to avoid overly etched and fatiguing highs (a sensible choice, given the nature of many modern recordings). Given killer source material, such as the exquisitely recorded celeste on The Nutcracker Suite, from Ernest Ansermet and Royal Opera House Orchestra’s The Royal Ballet (LP, RCA/Classic LDS-6065), the highs were beautifully grainless and tactile. The character of individual recording spaces was very slightly diminished, but the perfumed atmospherics of Soriano and Frühbeck de Burgos’ unmatched performance of de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain (LP, Alto/EMI ASD 545) was spellbinding.

I shamelessly adore the Beecham/Royal Philharmonic Scheherazade, preferring that interpretation to the more famous Reiner/Chicago recording [me too—Ed.]. My older-than-dirt red-label LP (Angel S35505) is still in surprisingly good shape, and the Legacys (with the VTL TL-7.5 and Lamm ML1.1 amps) showed Sir Tommy’s seductress in rich, lustrous light. This performance combines drama, sweetness, and sheer sex appeal in a never-equaled way. The Legacys let me hear individual violinists—and lots of them—playing together with discipline and purpose. Everyone had enough elbow room, and the ensemble sound had excellent weight and density.

Dynamics were what one would reasonably expect from a large, well-executed large system—very impressive—and were consistent from the low bass through the penultimate octave. The same slight timbral softening was echoed in a minor diminution of dynamics in the same top half-octave. The Focus was a tremendous performer with large-scale power music, whether rock or classical. It also proved highly adept at resolving low-level detail, and did not excel merely at the kaboom moments.

The Focus 20/20 showed a decided preference for two quite different-sounding speaker cables. The Cardas Golden Reference biwires brought a delicious palpability and sensuality to their presentation, and the Nordost Valhalla (used with Stereovox jumpers from mid/tweeter to bass) opened up the lateral aspect of the soundstage a bit more and resolved more low-level information, particularly at the back of the stage.

Redefining value
Bill Dudleston wasn’t kidding when he said that the Focus is a speaker designed for music lovers, but to deduce from this that they won’t be satisfying to audiophiles would be inaccurate. While the speaker’s emphasis is not on the virtues of audio per se, it does nearly everything that the fussiest audiophile might want. I found the Focus 20/20 to be a generous, big-hearted speaker that gave enormous pleasure, and brought life and joy to the music that I put through it. A bit forgiving sometimes, yes, but it’s a lot easier to love the wonderful girl who acknowledges but tolerates your shortcomings and quirks than the one who consistently picks at your every little imperfection.

As always, I trusted my own judgments in evaluating the Focus, but perhaps the most eloquent testimonials to its essence came from friends. The singer in the band I occasionally play bass guitar with doesn’t give a hoot in hell about audio—her inexpensive receiver, and the Bose modular speakers strewn haphazardly around her living room, are ample evidence of that. Though Tina loves music, she had never offered much comment on the exotica she’d heard in my listening room on various occasions. But when I played "Wicked Game," from Chris Isaak’s Heart Shaped World (LP, Reprise 25837-1), for her through the Legacys, the expression on her face at its conclusion was priceless. She looked at me in completely stunned joy. "I never knew music could sound like that." (I must admit that the Legacys were in exceptionally suave company that evening, driven by the Manley Steelhead, the VTL TL-7.5, and the Hovland Radia, which I will be reviewing in the near future.)

On the other side of the audiophile spectrum, a very good pal of mine is a longtime audio-industry professional; after a lengthy Saturday night bull-and-listening session, his only comment was, "It’s so enjoyable to listen to these speakers—you never notice them, only the music." Higher praise there is not.

Yes, you can get a bit more pure resolution from other speakers, as well as a soupçon of extra timbral refinement and image specificity. I do not minimize one bit the importance of that extra performance, but you’d better be prepared to shell out new-car kind of money to get it. Any speaker that equals or surpasses the Focus 20/20’s combination of unforced musicality and broadband excellence will come very dear indeed. Even more impressive is that Bill Dudleston has done this the hard way. Integrating a seven-driver, five-way system to this degree of excellence is one difficult job. To do it this well, and for such a comparatively reasonable price, is an extraordinary achievement.

Lessons Learned
When JA introduced me at a "Meet the Editors" forum at the Home Entertainment 2003 show, he accurately described my beat as "the cost-no-object stuff." And yes, I am terribly spoiled, but not so dogmatic that I can’t have some preconceptions shattered when the facts demand it. Many in the world of audio—including, at times, yours truly—have long held fast to the mistaken belief that only a certain amount of performance is available at any given price point, and that the higher the price, the higher the performance. This is often true, but not always—and the Focus 20/20 is conclusive proof. The speaker gave me a sort of reverse sticker shock.

There’s no denying that all reviewers approach any product they review with some set of expectations, however vague. I expected the Legacys to be competent—the company’s excellent reputation and longevity virtually guaranteed that. This business weeds out the incompetent and the mediocre with ruthless vengeance, and few speaker manufacturers survive for long, much less for 20 years, without consistently delivering the goods. What I was not prepared for was the breadth and depth of the Focus’ performance envelope at such a reasonable price.

I know that, in "real-world" terms, $6500 is a pile of money to spend on a pair of speakers. But the world of high-end audio is nothing if not a fantasyland. In this world there are speakers that cost twenty times as much as the Legacy, and these days there are more $20-$30k speakers than you can shake a stick at. In the audio world, value is therefore a far more flexible concept, and I know of no speaker close to the Focus’ price that can offer as much of everything as it does. In the completeness of its ability to connect emotionally with a listener on the deepest levels, the Focus is, if not singular, mightily exceptional.

The Legacy Focus 20/20 is a genuinely full-range speaker in every sense; its frequency response, dynamic capabilities, resolution, and sense of musical communication can fairly be compared to cone speakers costing far, far more, and a select few panel speakers that are, inevitably, more difficult to drive than is the Focus. Combine the 20/20’s outstanding overall performance with its efficiency, easiness to drive, and quality of handcraftsmanship, and the results is the finest value that I have ever encountered in high-end audio. Quite an accomplishment, Mr. Dudleston. Take a bow—you’ve more than earned it.

Speakers are in excellent condition and well taken care of being in just one spot for the last few years. Recent trade in from meticulous owner. Upgraded finish and later production made this pair $7200.00 retail. Have the original boxes but very heavy speakers would need to ship freight line.