Recording - March 2014 - 41

only thing holding the assembly together
when closed, you do not want to lose it!),
and a 1/4" jack for the special cable that
connects the Right channel to the Left. This
is a speaker cable, not a conventional
instrument cable, so take good care of it
and don't try to swap it out with your guitarist's spare hookup. Plug in the Left
speaker to the wall (it uses a conventional
IEC power cord), hook up your stereo mix
to the Left side, and you're in business.
Turn them on
The rear panel of the Left speaker offers Left
and Right inputs on balanced 1/4" TRS, so
they can be fed from pretty much any audio
source. The output to the Right speaker
is here, as well as the AC plug, power
switch, fuse, and voltage selector.
The front panel of the Left speaker
has three controls: a Level pot (for my
listening sessions I turned it all the way
up and controlled levels from my console) and two switches to adjust Bass
or Treble response. They're shelving
equalizers that can be set flat or to cut
or boost by 1.5 dB, a very conservative number that works well for fine-tuning their response in unusual setups.
The manual doesn't provide the corner
frequencies, but Fender tells us they're
75 Hz and 7.5 kHz respectively.
In addition, the front panel has two
minijacks. One is for a Stereo Aux In
that is automatically mixed with the
signal coming to the rear-panel inputs;
the other is a stereo Headphone Out
that mutes the speakers when plugged
in. Fender provides a shielded mini-tomini cable for use with the Aux In
jack, to accept audio from an iPod or
other sound source.
Before we get to listening, I should
mention a few specs for those readers
who are curious. Probably the most
significant one is the Passport Studio's
frequency response: 50 Hz to 20 kHz
±3 dB. That's respectable performance for speakers this small, and I doubt
you'd see a believable number that's
much lower in any monitor with woofers
this size (5"). The woofers are fed by
50W/channel and the 1" aluminum-magnesium tweeters by 25W per channel, for
a maximum SPL of 108 dB at 1 meter-in
other words, a good 8 to 10 dB louder
than any self-respecting engineer should
be listening to mixes for more than a few
minutes at a time.
Oh, one more spec before I forget: the
entire system, packed up and ready to
move, weighs a bit over 18 pounds.
Everyone I showed it to was shocked at
how light and portable it was.
Listen to them
I hooked up the Passport Studio speakers in my listening room at the office and
burned them in with a variety of music. The

manual recommends several hours, but I
let them play overnight just to be on the
safe side. Then I began my usual critical listening tests with rock, jazz, electronica,
country/Americana, and classical music
from my go-to library.
I was mightily impressed by what I got.
Focal definitely knows what it's doing
when designing small speaker systems that
give you the most bang possible in a small
space, and the Passport Studio holds up its
Focal heritage proudly. No, these speakers
won't replace the Solo 6 Be with its beryllium tweeter, or even the CMS 50 with its
nonresonant metal shell, but they sound
really good for what they are.

And by "for what they are" I mean
"speakers with a 5" woofer." It's physics-
a woofer of a certain size simply can't
deliver bass below a certain frequency,
and 3 dB down at 50 Hz is a respectable
low-end response for speakers this size.
What bass there is, is tight, controlled,
nicely detailed, and lovely to listen to;
checking your mixes on a sub should
prove to be a final tweak to a process that
will be accurate and pleasurable to the ear
on these speakers.
Above the bass, the response is impeccable. Mids are clear and authoritative,
details on guitars and vocals come out
delightfully; the highs are extended,
smooth, and only spitty if you use spitty
mics on your cymbals. Soundstaging is
fantastic, with very clear and believable
stereo imaging and an overall listening
experience that is honest and detailed yet

not fatiguing. These speakers are simply a
joy to listen to; I was worried that the lightweight plastic enclosure might result in resonant "wolf tones", but sine sweeps and
extended listening didn't point out any
glaring nonlinearities.
One last anecdote to round out this
review: about two weeks into the review
period I got tagged to do a concert at a
small coffee shop in Longmont, Colorado
(thanks to Chris at La Vita Bella for thinking
of me!) and wasn't sure if the relatively small
monophonic sound system in the room
(roughly 20' x 60') would do the job... so I
grabbed the Passport Studio down off the
speaker stands, packed it up, and took it
along. At 18 pounds, why not?
We set up the Passport Studio at
our feet, just sitting on the front edge
of the stage and aimed at the audience's knees. Darwin Grosse and I
played a two-hour set to a packed
house and got a lot of compliments,
but a fair percentage of them were
from friends of ours, audio geeks all,
who came up to stare at the Passport
Studio speakers and beg us for more
details on them. According to our listeners, these definitely-not-PA speakers
filled the room beautifully and gave
our music-admittedly it was ambient
electronica with string instruments and
keyboards, no drum kit or guitar amps
to compete with, but still-a fantastic
sound that was clear and articulate
all the way to the back of the room.
For that reason as well as the sheer
pleasure of working with them, I'm
going to find these speakers very difficult to give back.
Pack them up, I'll take them
I have only two gripes with the
Passport Studio. One is that the supplied speaker cable limits you to a listener-speaker triangle of about 5' on
a side, which is a bit close for me; a
6' or even 8' cable would be nice, if
only as an add-on option. The other is that
while the tweeters are nicely protected
behind grilles, the woofers aren't, and I
was constantly worrying about bumps and
scrapes during setup damaging one of
them. I don't know what a grille would do
to the sound of the speaker, but I would
imagine Fender and Focal could work up
something that would preserve these speakers' great sound while offering a bit more
peace of mind to the engineer in a hurry.
But those small gripes aside, Fender and
Focal have created a beautiful little box of
magic here. The Passport Studio won't be
for everyone, but for a fair number of engineers working out of their cars, it could be
just what the doctor ordered.
Price: $799.99
More from: Fender, www.fender.com
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Recording - March 2014

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