Okay story time everyone.
I’ve been going through a bit of an issue with my OG Utopias over the last month and I finally was able to get it resolved today.
About a month ago around the time I got my LTA Z10, when I decided to test the headphone output on the amp I pulled my Utopias out for probably the first time in a few months, I’ve been using speakers more and more for my everyday listening needs so it had been a while. When I put the headphones on my head i realized that something was off, the headphone felt weirdly oily especially around the outer cups. I just kinda shrugged it off and thought, oh I probably should clean and wipe them down soon. A few songs later I ended up adjusting the fitment a bit and this time when I touched the cups it felt sticky and it was clearly all over my fingers at this point. I was like wtf is going on and started inspecting them.
As a lot of you have probably already guessed, yes I got hit with the infamous pad melting defect that plagued some of the earliest model utopias and pads. My utopia is a early model from Nov. 2016 and the pads as far as I can tell are also original from when I bought the headphones secondhand back in 2022. It’s not really an issue with the headphones themselves, but to my understanding actually a problem with the early run of the utopia pads where the plastic piece that connects the pads to the headphone housing will have a chemical reaction and just straight up start melting into a chemical goop… 
So yeah when I took off my pads to inspect the source of the stickiness, what I found was a massacre lol the plastic piece had melted all over the inside of the housing and in all the nooks and crannies around the driver and horrifying close to the driver itself. Luckily it did not look like a lot if any had actually came in contact with the drivers. Its also worth noting that this happened simultaneously to both pads.
My first thought was fuck this shit, damn focal QC just screwed me lol my second instinct was okay lets try to clean this up and assess the damage. Well I have to say that cleaning this mess up was nigh impossible, the goop had penetrated so far in the gaps/cracks that it would be impossible to get it all without disassembling the housing, which obviously I was not down to do. Not to mention that this stuff was sticky like a high quality glue and was not lifting off the plastic very easily either.
At this point I pretty much had come to terms with my headphone being trashed, But I decided to take a slim chance at contacting focal naim america and seeing if anything could be done. Now i have heard so many terrible things about focal after market support over the years ranging from unwillingness to answer simple questions to months long wait times to just being totally unresponsive. I didn’t really have much faith that anything was going to come out of this especially considering the headphone was purchased in 2016 and way past warranty and I wasn’t the original owner either.
Well I’m happy to report that my experience with Focal Naim America was flawless from start to finish. I emailed them and received a response less than an hour later, the rep I talked to listened to my problem and offered several suggestions on how to handle the situation and ultimately ended up sending the headphone in to be diagnosed and worked on by one of their technicians, I had the label to send it off the same day I emailed them and it was off in the post the next morning. Less than three weeks later the headphone was already on the way back to me and today it arrived.
To my utter surprise Focal honored the defect being on them and did a full service on my headphone with deep clean and even replaced the pads with brand new ones at no cost to me whatsoever. The report I received from the technician stated no problems with the drivers too.
So now I’m sitting here jamming out for the first time in a long while on my Utopia, everything is right in my world, sometimes things just work out 
Also Utopia on the LTA Z10 is a technical beast, my eddie current always sounded good with them but the microZOTL definitely has something that synergizes so well with this headphone.
