“The real added value is your human feeling,” Sylvain Gondinet

He grew up in Mantes-la-Jolie, learned piano very young and discovered Pink Floyd at 12, thanks to his father. Sylvain Gondinet wanted to be a sound engineer. His parents steered him towards science: prep classes in maths sup and maths spé in Dijon, then three years at an engineering school in Saint-Étienne, the city where he works today.

Degree in hand, he changed direction. Five years freelance as a sound engineer: studio, control room, tours, front of house, monitors. At the same time, he did studio design and optimized speaker systems for those who called him. Five years ago, Focal was looking for a product manager. He became Product Manager Monitoring for the Saint-Étienne brand, bridging the gap between studio sound engineers and the R&D team designing speakers, crossovers and electronics.

One word often comes up in his speech: compromise. Sylvain explains how beta tests decide when a compact speaker has to give up some of its bass, and why a monitor that "tells the truth" remains an ideal. He traces Focal's pro range, from a first 4,000-euro model to the Trio6 adopted by José Rios of the Free Nationals, talks about the Utopia Main installed at Victor Studio in Tokyo, and says what he leaves to AI in a job where, in the end, you have to listen.

Sylvain Gondinet - Product Manager Monitoring at Focal

The Tales interview

As far back as you can remember, what is your first memory of music?

There are two, and I can’t tell which came first. The first is a vague feeling: I’m at my parents’ house, my father listens a lot to ABBA, and it’s The Winner Takes It All. I must have been really little, I just remember the house, the light, that music playing. When I listened to it again much later, there was a feeling that hits you, you say: I heard this when I was very young, for sure.

The really strong memory, I was more like 12, still with my father. He made me listen to Pink Floyd, sorry, everyone tells me Pink Floyd. And no, it wasn’t The Dark Side of the Moon, it was Take It Back, on The Division Bell, because I’m a bit younger. I remember exactly where I was, down to the meter. I think my life wouldn’t have been the same without that track at that moment.

Did you grow up in a family of musicians?

No, no musician parents, and it’s not something I hide. But I was always listening to music, and I played: I learned piano very young. I had a spark pretty quickly, I wanted to learn the instrument, guitar. As a kid, I set my mind on learning saxophone, then I was told I was asthmatic, so not the easiest. But I’ve always had a connection with it. Always, always, always.

So your entry into sound came through music, not acoustics.

I wanted to be a sound engineer, but it was a mix of both, since I did an engineering education. Deep down, there was always that passion for music. Cinema, audiovisual, all that interests me too, but the entry point was always audio, and the medium where audio is most essential is music.

"A kind of teenage crisis, but at 22"

Can you sum up the main chapters of your journey?

Middle school, high school like everyone else. I come from Mantes-la-Jolie, not at all from Saint-Étienne where Focal is based. I wanted to be a sound engineer, but I was pretty good at physics and maths, and my parents pushed me towards science, which I also liked. Prep classes maths sup, maths spé in Dijon, where I have family, then engineering school in Saint-Étienne, three years. It’s funny: that was my arrival in Saint-Étienne, where Focal is now.

And I wanted so much to live from my passion that being just an engineer, in any field, didn’t interest me. I had a kind of teenage crisis, but at 22. Once I had my degree, I went freelance: sound engineer, a bit of control room, a bit of front of house, I trained myself on the practical side of live sound, and I did a lot of studio. Five years doing sound engineering, studio, control room, tours, front of house, monitors.

At the same time, with this technical background, I did studio design: I went to people’s places to optimize their speaker systems. And since I met lots of people through live sound, it fed both activities. Then Focal was looking for a product manager. It was perfect: I had both the very technical background of what a speaker is deep down, the driver, the crossover, the electronics, and a kind of passion for the studio world.

And that’s when you joined Focal.

Yeah, five years ago.

Your mission there, concretely?

On paper, Product Manager Monitoring. In reality, at Focal, studio monitors are technical products but also musical instruments. And the product manager is the internal client. It's funny, we're attached to marketing, but I act as the bridge between what the sound engineers will expect in the studio and what the engineers, electronics specialists, and acousticians in R&D will develop. I can say this sounds good, that is not great, and even upstream: tomorrow we should think about a speaker like this. R&D works with a specification sheet, but someone has to create that sheet. That's the job.

So, guiding.

Guiding, yeah. It's a hybrid job, half technical, half feeling. Since we make musical instruments, it's not all black and white, it's not a dishwasher with a running time and a drying time. You have to test the products day to day: we changed the midrange, we changed that, you have to listen with people to give your feedback. And I do that a lot with other sound engineers in the field, which helps dilute my tastes a bit. Because that's also the problem.

"The daily work is about making compromises"

Monitoring was historically reserved for studios. Today the range goes from home studios to very high-end. How do you juggle?

Alpha test, beta test. Sounds very video game-like, but it exists everywhere: in food, you make a chocolate bar, you take a group of people and have them taste it. It's the same, except the bar can be bigger or smaller, and you need two, or many more when you build an Atmos system. My job is to adapt my expectations to the target. In studios, we look for compact, and that's sometimes harder than big speakers: making a speaker that doesn't vibrate but has a lot of bass in a small volume is ultra hard. And there is the price, you don't want to make something unaffordable. So you know you'll make compromises, that's the daily work: here we give up crazy bass extension because it's a very small speaker, and at some point you have to release it. What helps you say it's good is the beta test.

Has Focal always wanted to speak to all these people, or is it a brand that expanded its range?

Focal's story stretches back to 1979, so to keep it short. Jacques Mahul founded the company, an audiophile, a very technical acoustician, passionate about home speakers and hi-fi. His brand was called JMlab at first, and his premise was: if I want a good speaker, I need good drivers. Today Focal is one of the few brands worldwide, in monitoring, to make its own drivers. That's the DNA. The name Focal came with someone joining the company for car audio, and the two brands merged around 2000.

The pro range started around 2002, because Jacques Mahul was already selling drivers to other monitoring brands, like KRK, and we could do everything ourselves. Strangely, we started with the very high end of the studio: in 2002 music was at a peak of profitability. A 4,000 euro speaker, digital, ultra avant-garde for the time. Total flop, unstable. In 2005 we understood we needed something more affordable and more compact, that's the Solo6. And around 2008, with the CMS range, we saw where music was heading: the home studio. Between 2010 and 2020, that market interested us the most.

A somewhat metaphysical question: how do you design a product whose quality is to add nothing?

The easy part is that physically, adding something is called distortion. A speaker where you send a 1 kHz sine wave and get back the same sine wave, no extra harmonics, has low THD, low Rub & Buzz. You reduce all unwanted noises, you take care of the timing so the cone stays rigid and there is no smearing. That optimizes well. The problem is people also want a frequency response that extends, so it's always compromises. And here you get into the metaphysical: telling the truth is an ideal, you can't reach it. If it existed, all monitors would sound the same and people would just buy the cheapest. Yet at the same price, they sound different. Even in physics we're not there. So in the end, you have to listen.

"The French team going to the US"

You took the Utopia Main to Tokyo. What's that like, being in Saint-Étienne?

The speaker came out a year ago, we installed it in many places, up to Tokyo, with an event at Victor Studio last year. Being in Saint-Étienne and suddenly finding yourself in Japan, it's emotional. Plus there is a real audio culture there: our acoustics lead, who developed many of our drivers, is Japanese, he worked at TAD. Arriving with a new approach, new speakers, a new midrange, and seeing people on the other side of the world passionate about what you say, it's incredible. You realize that in monitoring and hi-fi, we represent France a bit, without getting full of ourselves. The French team going to the United States.

And being a world reference in such a niche?

It's very rewarding: you're proud to present the speaker you've worked on day and night. And it's a lot of pressure, because it's a niche and there are always plenty of new products coming out. Plus, it touches people: your goal is to put a black box in someone's home and have them feel something. You also have to accept those who just won't like what you offer. So it's not just pride, you have to stay informed about what competitors are doing on the other side of the world. It's a calling, it can't be done half-heartedly.

In the United States, in Asia, do they know where Saint-Étienne is on the map?

No. There's even a story: we work with a subsidiary in Canada for North American distribution, and some Americans thought Focal was Canadian because they saw the invoices. Since French is spoken there too, it could pass. Saint-Étienne, let's be honest, no. When we tell the story we locate the city, but most people mainly see the French side.

And do you feel the Focal aura when you travel?

Completely, because it's a brand that touches so many ways of listening to music: from studio to car, from portable headphones to home speakers, to home cinema. We try to reach anyone sensitive to music, it brings an incredible aura. It's not easy, we're not a huge company and sometimes we position ourselves against Apple, against very big pure consumer brands. But we've always said we came for people who care about music, for whom it's a vehicle of emotion. They expect a Focal sound, and a Naim sound as well, for ten years now. It's important, in this field, that people identify a sound signature.

"The most important thing is the little tune"

You bust your head making good sound when most people listen to MP3 and compressed streaming. How do you deal with that?

We're not here to make consumption, but for the person to sit down, close their eyes and get into it. So it's not hard to live with, and I even find it great that music has opened up so much. MP3 is not a tragedy: musicians started with bad speakers, bad headphones, and still grew their ear. If I whistle La Mer to you, you recognize it, it's the theme, the rhythm, the most important. We offer the almost final layer, but the essential is the little tune.

Same for sampling before the 2000s: those people couldn't offer anything without samplers. I'm rather of the opinion that everyone should have access to any means of making music. After that, that's where a company shows its values: in hi-fi, with Naim and streamers, we only integrated Spotify in lossless, or Qobuz. Mostly high resolution services. And I find that low resolution created a need: people said, wait, we can listen to something in high resolution. It's not a fight, it's an awareness.

AI is arriving in force. In your job, what does that mean?

I could put my phone on recorder and ask ChatGPT what it thinks of the sound of this speaker. I wouldn't be calm, and I know it won't happen. It's like asking a guy who works at Fender if one day ChatGPT could tell him, when he picks up the guitar, if it sounds. Someone has to take it in hand and feel it. In my job, I'm not worried. On the contrary, it makes many things easier, it summarizes meetings, we use Copilot.

And in design?

It can help draw a little faster. I'm a very bad drawer, so to show, I imagine a speaker like this, it's practical. But we mostly use it for office work.

Not in engineering calculations?

No, because at some point you have to assemble a prototype and test it. Engineers use a lot of COMSOL for speaker simulation, electro-acoustics, mechanics. AI helps debug COMSOL, but it's not powerful enough to run a simulation. On the application side, everything software-wise at Naim, of course it helps code.

Carte blanche: tomorrow, you equip the studio of your choice, in the country of your choice.

There are too many, I can't choose, I like them all. I could say Abbey Road, because my favorite album is The Dark Side of the Moon, but really any studio, even the smallest. Not long ago, José Rios, producer and guitarist of the Free Nationals, who did some Bruno Mars and a lot of production on Anderson .Paak's Malibu, took some Trio6 and he loves them, he even wanted to make a video that we put on our YouTube. That feeling of knowing this guy took the speaker we worked on for years, that I carried on my back to have it tested, and that on the other side of the Earth he wakes up in the morning wanting to make music on it. Forget it, I can die happy. So all of them, there's not just one studio.

Any advice for a young engineer in love with music?

With all the AI models, general knowledge doesn’t get you far: if you’re not critical of what an AI spits out, it’s hard to take a stand. The real added value is your human feeling. Get out, don’t stay home. You can prompt stuff, but curiosity means going to studios, talking with people. That will always have value, it gives you perspective and a real human touch, based on what you know about people, what they’re looking for in a speaker. Stay curious, and don’t hesitate to travel.