Hands on: Naim Mu-so Utopia review

The Mu-so Hekla felt like a big deal for Focal and Naim. While branded as a Focal product, the all-in-one Hekla represented a careful collaboration between the French manufacturer and its sister company Naim Audio, with Naim’s Mu-so wireless speaker pedigree adopted under the prestigious Focal banner.

The new Naim Mu-so Utopia promises to take that symbiosis to new levels of performance and price. Billed as the “Hekla with the brakes off”, the new Mu-so Utopia all-in-one wireless system once again takes the amplification and pedigree from Naim’s Award-winning range of Mu-so wireless speakers, married to trickle-down technology taken from Focal’s high-end range of Utopia-branded loudspeakers.

The Hekla but better? Focal driver tech powered by Naim amplification? One listen was never going to be enough, so we headed to both Naim’s UK headquarters and Focal’s facility in France to get a proper taste of what the Mu-so Utopia can do.

Price

The Naim Mu-so Utopia will set you back £4499 / $5500 at launch, a good deal more than the £3000 / $3600 for the mighty Hekla we took for a spin earlier in the summer, and a lot more than, say, the £1299 / $1699 for the five-star Ruark Audio R410 all-in-one system we have so admired since its 2023 launch.

That’s a decent wad of cash by most objective standards, but when you have a product that’s touted as a soundbar, a streaming hub and a Dolby Atmos-powered hi-fi and surround system, the numbers do make more sense. On paper, at least.

Build and design

We’ll do our best to rein ourselves in here. We know that the Utopia doesn’t come cheap, that we have encountered it only in a demo setting, and that taste is an inherently subjective and slippery beast; but it’s hard not to be enchanted by the imposing allure of this substantial all-in-one system.

The Naim Mu-so Utopia follows the same core design language as the Fokal Mu-so Hekla and Naim Mu-so 2 systems that preceded it. It has a brushed black anodised aluminium chassis complemented by a red trim that runs lengthways across the unit’s 40cm-long body.

Speaking of which, the Utopia is a pretty sizeable beast, weighing in at around 14kg – so you’re going to need a reasonable amount of space and a sturdy rack capable of giving it proper support. If you intend to integrate it within a home cinema system, a separate rack from your TV is probably going to be required if you don’t want to block the bottom of your screen.

At the top of the all-in-one wireless system, you will find the same white illuminated dial used across the Mu-so range. You can control volume with a turn to the side, with the dial acting as a touch screen to adjust input and power. While we didn’t have the chance to try it out for ourselves, our time using the Hekla suggests that we are likely to be equally happy getting up close and personal with the Utopia when we get the chance.

Physical connections include HDMI eARC, for integration within a home cinema system, as well as an optical input and an RCA output if, say, you want to pair your Mu-so Utopia with a bass-boosting subwoofer. There is also an ethernet port for granting a more stable internet connection.

Inside, the Mu-so Utopia packs 720 watts of Class D and A/B amplification driving a whopping 15 drive units, teasing an “immersive experience” that will happily cover rooms up to around 50m² in size.

Most of the drivers are powered using Class D amplification, including a pair of 2.75cm ‘M-shaped’ mid-range woofers and four full-range drivers housed at the sides and top of the unit.

Twin 25mm ‘PRISM’ tweeters – derived from those used on Focal’s high-end Scala and Diva Utopia loudspeaker ranges – are driven using Class A/B power, with Focal’s engineers telling us that A/B grants greater control and precision in the upper frequency ranges.

Features

At this kind of price, you should expect an extensive streaming suite backed by decent high-resolution file support. So Tidal, Qobuz and Spotify are all on board in their ‘Connect’ versions, as are AirPlay 2, Google Cast and Bluetooth 5.3 with standard AAC and SBC codecs.

UPnP streaming supports playing stored files from your local network, whereas multi-room capabilities let you create a chained system with compatible Naim and Focal products.

The Utopia is capable of handling hi-res files up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM alongside DSD128, while Dolby Atmos support is one of the system’s big trump cards.

There are plenty of sound modes from which to choose, including a ‘Dolby Movie’ mode for smaller or more standard listening rooms, alongside ‘Sphere Music’ and ‘Sphere Movie’, the latter of which uses Focal’s beamforming tech to construct “exceptional clarity and spatial accuracy”.

There is even a Night Mode, which reduces dynamics and bass so you don’t disturb your neighbours or co-habitants.

You can choose your desired listening mode using the Focal & Naim app, a platform from which you can also calibrate your system’s settings via an equaliser and Focal’s ‘ADAPT’ (Adaptive Acoustic Personal Tuning) room-calibration technology.

ADAPT collects and analyses data about your listening space and then adjusts the resultant audio output accordingly; just be aware that you will need to know your room’s dimensions first if you want a proper tailor-made experience.

The Mu-so Utopia doesn’t come with its own dedicated remote, so you will be operating predominantly via the dedicated app or, if you’re an iPhone user, Siri voice control. HDMI CEC further allows your television’s remote to control your Utopia without needing a separate device.

Sound

At What Hi-Fi?, we like to be thorough, and we like to do things properly. As such, we have heard the Mu-so Utopia in two separate countries, listening at Naim’s headquarters in Salisbury, England, before flying over to France to discover how it sounds in Focal’s dedicated Saint-Étienne facility.

These demonstrations are, naturally, never going to be as in-depth as having the product to ourselves, and we will need to get a review sample of our own before we know whether or not Naim’s latest system makes the grade. Still, the two trips have given us a firm idea of what the Mu-so Utopia can do.

Our Salisbury session was, as the French might say, something of an apéritif. Even with Naim’s gentle warning that its particular model still needed a bit of tinkering to its tuning, our three-track sampler gave us a taste of the system’s abilities.

Lyle Lovett’s The Road to Ensanada hints at the unit’s capacity to bring texture and delicacy to the track’s gentle guitar strums, whereas Leo Kottke’s Across the Street sounds fulsome and rich as Kottke’s meatier guitar playing fills Naim’s listening room with breadth and authority. Like the best demos, it leaves us wanting more.

A few weeks down the line, that’s exactly what we get. With a Mu-so Utopia firing on its native turf, we have the chance to hear what the premium all-in-one system can do across music, movies and even a short gaming showcase.

The cinematic portion of the demo includes a Dolby Atmos clip from 2014’s Unbroken, during which the American Air Force is sent on a bombing mission against Japanese installations on Nauru during the Second World War.

The Utopia’s ability to fill Focal’s 50m² test room without breaking stride is remarkable, but what really gives us hope is how it handles directional audio.

There is a tangible sense of definite sonic placement as anti-aircraft explosions burst and thud amidst the soaring allied planes. And, as an enemy fighter whizzes past our central heroes, we experience the sound of the aircraft’s engine moving from right to left as the Utopia tracks that roaring growl with precision and authority.

Away from movies, the Mu-so Utopia can be integrated as part of a gaming set-up – something Focal’s enthusiastic team demonstrate via a Dolby Atmos-powered clip from the ever-chaotic Star Wars: Battlefront II.

It’s a typically barnstorming sampler, and once again the Naim seems accomplished in how it grants genuine scope and scale to the unfolding action as lasers blast, soldiers bark orders to one another, and spaceships whizz across the crowded sky.

Our continental demonstration ends with the Mu-so Utopia flexing its musical muscles via renditions of Bittersweet by Billie Eilish, Happiness Is Simple by Simon Franglen from Avatar: The Way of Water, and Annette Askvik’s Liberty.

Again, our initial impressions are positive. Subtler textural insights rarely appear to go missing amid the Utopia’s remarkably powerful, room-filling approach, be they the whispered idiosyncrasies of Eilish’s signature vocals or the mournful strings that rise and fall across the elegiac Liberty.

Happiness Is Simple further hints at the Mu-so Utopia’s apparent talents for blending power and precision, with the premium system granting shape and scale to the track’s arcing strings as they soar above simple percussive rhythms and impish pipes.

If we had to raise any point of concern, it would be that the Utopia occasionally showed hints of hardness in the mid-to-upper ranges, especially during a closing stereo recording of Dr Dre’s What’s the Difference. This, though, could well have been due to the volume the track was playing at and our proximity to the unit itself.

A more suitable listening position and volume – not to mention ample running-in time to smooth out those hard edges – may well rectify any potential issues.

Early verdict

Does the Mu-so Utopia live up to its name tag as an all-in-one system capable of taking you to a higher plane of audio enjoyment?

It’s too early to say. That asking price is far from a modest sum, especially when compared with the five-star Hekla, so the step-up model is going to have to work hard to justify not only its higher price tag, but its place within the Mu-so range.

We’ll need much more time to get to grips with everything that new system can do, but it’s hard not to be optimistic at this stage. The Utopia has ample Mu-so pedigree on its side, and when you’ve got trickle-down tech from Focal joining with amplification from Naim, you’re always going to have a fighting chance.

For now, though, all we can do is wait until we get a Naim Mu-so Utopia into our own test rooms to give it the full What Hi-Fi? test treatment. Stay tuned.

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