Auditioning The Fyne 703 Soon


I have had my von Schweikert DB 99se loudspeakers almost 17 years and they still sound good to my ears but I am intrigued by this new company. I will let the Forum know my impressions. These new loudspeakers should match up well with my PrimaLuna integrated amplifier
128x128tuberist

Showing 6 responses by mulveling

Very good point and interesting concern raised by @mijostyn .

A 1st order 850 Hz high pass will send an awful lot of energy to the tweeter. By comparison, the big Tannoys had a 2nd order 1100 Hz high pass. Their 2" compression tweeters had 2" round wire voice coils to help dissipate the heat. The Fyne has a 3" compression tweeter (and I assume coil?) so all else equal that can handle more power. For sure, the Tannoys are robust but if something goes bad it’s going to be the compression tweeter from either overdriving, manufacturing defect, or a combo of both. I had a tweeter start to go slightly noisy/distorted in Kensington SE. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure; really subtle and only barely noticeable in specific scenarios, but it’s a good idea to have spare tweeters on hand - they’re relatively affordable and easy to replace here.

Cabinet wise the Fynes follow the Tannoy Definition line - contemporary curved cabinets with rear reflex porting. The focus is more on styling and bracing/rigidity than cabinet air volume. To be quite honest this line never gelled with me sonically. The Prestige line is front vented, not reflex ported, and always seemed to have a richer midrange with a better musical balance. Not sure how much of that difference is from the porting, but I can have my suspicions. The starkest contrast of these cabinets is Definition 10A versus Kensington SE, both with the the same 10" driver. I did not like the 10A at ALL. Bright, lean, aggressive.

Fair, I shouldn’t be commenting anymore on Fyne before I hear them. But this experience with Tannoys most likely carries over: when you buy these, get a pair of spare tweeters for your Fyne and stash them away safely for peace of mind.

I hadn’t read complains of Tannoys failing either, but I’ve definitely witnessed degraded tweeter performance: once on my Kensington SE, and once on a friend’s Dimension TD10. Upon discussing it more with my dealer "oh yeah, that can happen". It was a rather subtle distortion in nature, and only one tweeter was affected each time. Didn’t wait around to see if it would get worse; just replaced them and they were at peak performance afterwards. Didn’t happen again. The cost of the replacement tweeters should be reasonable. I'm guessing the Fynes will be more akin to the Tannoy tulip tweeters, which include the waveguide and magnet in their assembly (alnico Tannoys tweeters are just the 2" metal diaphragm, voice coil, and plastic end cap).

All three models had the fast, lively and engaging sound you expect from Tannoy-based designs, but, to me, they sound substantially better than Tannoys because they did not have the slightly hard and sibilant edge in the upper midrange that I hear with the high end Tannoys.

@larryi Yeah, I believe the Tannoy alnico/pepperpot drivers featured in the upper half of the Prestige line could be perceived this way. Careful gear matching can mitigate it. I think the Tannoy tulip waveguides w/ ferrous magnet drivers (which is a much newer design; the pepperpots date back go the 1940s!) tend to be a bit more easy going here. The Fyne drivers appear more akin to the tulip drivers and probably implement further refinements - it was about time!

However I do fail to see why vinylvalet’s suggested procedure for break-in with new speakers is "silly", unless it was just his loudness level? In that case I agree it was unnecessary.

@pryso In my experience with Tannoys - running them "close to distortion" over time is tempting fate. They sound better after burn-in, but not THAT much better, unless something is wrong with them. Not worth the risk, IMO.

@mijostyn chill a bit dude, it’s just a hobby. Did waiting so long for the SOTA put you out of sorts? 😕

Recently however there are questions about design and manufacturing under the new ownership at Tannoy. Therefore I’m curious about the Fyne speakers. But not many dealers yet so not easy to audition.

@pryso  Yep - my Tannoy dealer hasn’t picked up Fyne yet. And nobody knows exactly what the roadmap/outlook looks like for Tannoy. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if they suddenly announce dropping the Prestige line and Kingdom Royals. There is nothing to indicate any production of that line has occurred snice the Coatbridge closure, and lots of doubt about the "quality" of new production, if it ever happens.

Canterbury GR are possibly my "lifers" and I have full spare drivers for them, otherwise I’d be looking hard at the Fyne F704, F1 10, and F1 12 right now.

Canterbury GR is the current model, since 2013. SE is the old model, which Jim owned, and which I owned before I bought GR. It does appear now that the move of all Tannoy production over to China (including Legacy and Prestige lines) has been confirmed, sadly. There may still be UK stock on hand filling orders for the time being - hard to say for sure. I bet they’ve dropped the UK stickers for Chinese production.

I’ve been watching Fyne with very much interest, but it’s gonna be tough to make me move from my Tannoys. The fact is that dual 10"/12" drivers or a single 12" is going to sound different than the single massive 15" alnico Tannoy. There will be plusses and minuses to that. There is a scale, intimacy, and life-like image size of the 15" driver that was not replicated in the 10" and 12" Tannoys. On the other hand, asking a 15" woofer to reproduce up to 1.1kHz (and beyond) has its problems too. 
@vinylvalet 
To be fair, Jim had the Canterbury SE and I believe they retailed for $20K at the time. That SE model would in fact benefit from additional clarity & detail that would presumably be imparted by the Duelund crossover. The current model/iteration is the Canterbury GR, which is $30K. Much more detail, clarity, and extension on the GR, when comparing stock models.