The Bristol HiFi Show 2023 is well underway and it has brought all sorts of great tech treats with it.
Highlights included the appearance of Klipsch’s The Sevens and The Nines Heritage Speakersthe Rega Naia turntable debuts and of course more exclusive Bristol Show Offers then easy to count.
But for me there was one specific product that caught my eye: the Fyne Audio Vintage Five. For those who are with the show, this may sound a little strange. After all, that’s for sure the £30k Fyne Vintage Fifteen that was revealed next to that is more exciting?
And technically, yes, that’s right. To catch up with readers, the Vintage Fifteen is the largest loudspeaker in Fyne Audio’s current retro-inspired Vintage line-up, above the older Vintage Ten and Vintage Twelve.
On a technical and marketing level, it’s also the one the company has made the most noise about, claiming that the Vintage Fifteen is the “most ambitious” to date and that the custom dynamic IsoFlare driver will deliver audio with “the precision and scale of a full orchestra.”
We haven’t listened to the speaker yet, so can’t confirm if this is true, but given how well previous Fyne speakers have performed when we’ve put them to the test in our listening rooms, we’re excited to find out. when we receive them for review.
If sure Which Hi-Fi? team members have pointed out that the Five’s £3,749.99 price tag is fairly steep for a speaker pair of their size. Check out our guide to the best bookshelf speakers and you won’t see many other options at that price point. Regular non-audiophile readers would also cry after doing the math to figure out how many Apple HomePod 2 and Sonos One speakers they could buy for the same price.
But it’s actually the rather small size that appeals to me the most and makes the Fyne Vintage Five so appealing. Myself and our editor in chief, Becky Roberts, have both made it no secret that we are very excited about the prospect of better, but smaller hi-fi. This was also one of the main reasons I got so excited about the Cambridge Audio MXN10 streamer when I played around with it earlier this year.
The truth is, as much as it pains me to admit, I couldn’t fit the Fyne Vintage Ten, much less the Vintage Fifteen, into my house, even if I could sneak it past my fiancée, which would be a big if, in a two up, two down London mansion. And my neighbors wouldn’t thank me for it.
This feeling was compounded when I saw the Fifteen in the wild. Make no mistake, there’s a reason all the promotional material shows it on site in a palace or mansion – it’s gigantic.
That’s why I really found the five speakers so fascinating. The photo at the top of this article really doesn’t do justice to how beautiful the Five look, with their birch plywood – which is hand finished in oiled walnut veneer and burl walnut inlay – really oozing class.
Then there’s the fact that they’re built by Fyne Audio, a speaker company with an excellent hi-fi pedigree and whose speakers consistently scored incredibly well in our testing. To catch you up, both the Fyne Audio F302i and Fyne Audio F501 earned five-star ratings when we reviewed them.
That’s why I’m particularly curious to see how the smaller IsoFlare driver – which combines a 5-inch (125mm) multi-fiber cone mid/bass driver with FyneFlute surround and a 19mm magnesium dome HF compression driver with a neodymium motor system – performs in the real world. I can’t help but be a little more excited about it than its bigger, more expensive sibling.
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