Auditioning The Fyne 703 Soon

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.

The 703 ports out the bottom. Thanks for the inputs. Sonics are most important to me but aesthetics count too.

@tuberist , correct, They port out the bottom through a secondary enclosure into a 360 degree slot. I believe this is a method of tuning the port to work over a broader band. Not totally sure on that. It might also dampen port noise. Regardless, in todays world you can make any sealed design do whatever you want in a distortionless manner with DSP and enough power. This really applies to subwoofers which this speaker really needs anyway to lower distortion in the midrange/woofer and to keep the tweeter from frying not to mention low bass. I would plug the port with expanding foam and get subwoofers. (with a 2 way crossover)  

Having to satisfy the wife is not compatible with decent sound. First of all, there is no satisfying them. There is always going to be something wrong with everything. To you blossoming audiophiles out there, you have to make a deal before you get married. You get X and I get my HiFi and my own room. You can get them involved by letting them design the room around your HiFi gear.

@mijostyn I've cranked up F703 speakers in a large room with a powerful solid state amp, so loud I had to wear ear protection because I wanted to see when they would go into distortion. I do that because, you will only really, totally break in a speaker if you drive it just short of distortion for a while. Best way to do that is put the speakers in a back room, face them at each other and reverse the speaker cables on one.

Anyway, no, you won't need a subwoofer to get bass with authority below 50hz.

I'm not hearing anything that the posters above who have not heard the speaker but think the speaker must sound like, with my F703 speakers

These speculative posts without actually owning or listening to the product being discussed is a huge disservice this forum.

@vinylvalet , I am very happy that you have speakers you like.

That is a patently silly way to "break in" loudspeakers. Without a specific decibel reading I have no idea what "loud" to you is. I can blow those speakers in a heartbeat. Bring them over and I will show you. Bring me a print out of the their frequency response from 10 Hz to 20 kHz at your listening position and I will show you how they do not produce very much low bass. What you hear is not a good indication. People think they hear bass coming out of computer speakers. Sorry, you can not overcome the laws of physics. I strongly suggest you get two subwoofers. You will also notice a marked improvement in your midrange. (less distortion)