Join Dave Waters at Fyne Audio, for a guided tour of the Vintage and Classic loudspeaker ranges. Filmed at Fyne Audio’s facility in Bellshill, Glasgow, this video explores the design philosophy, core technologies, and key differences between Classic, Classic Gold, and flagship Vintage models from IsoFlare™ drivers and BassTrax™ 360° sound to luxury real wood cabinets.
Hi, my name is Dave Waters, Sales Manager at Fyne Audio and welcome to our facility here in Bellshill, Glasgow. What I want to do is to walk through the family of our Vintage and Classic range of products. We’ve always seem to have a large portfolio, but we tried to break each range down to a good, better, best scenario.
So, what we have here is our standard Classic VIII from the Classic range of products. We have our Classic Gold SP at the end and our flagship Vintage product. They’re all based on the same sort of core technologies that we developed which is our IsoFlare point source drive unit technology with the FyneFlute suspension system. These are core technologies that we developed when the company was founded about eight or nine years ago.
And in the base of the cabinet, we have our Tractrix profile, which is our Tractrix system that enables the energy to come out of the loudspeaker and effectively turns it into a 360° soundwave. So, the positioning of the speaker is an awful lot easier in the room. But the difference between the three different products, we have good, we have better, we have best.
Classic is a fantastic traditional retro styled product but incorporates all of our 21st century core technology. We have a black MDF baffle. The cabinet work is MDF or HDF veneered. We have the controls on the front. So we’ve got adjustments for HF presence and energy. So we have all the technology but in a more retro styled cabinet design.
The Classic Gold product which is the one at the far end incorporates the same sort of platform and profile of cabinet but we’ve now borrowed all the technology from our flagship Vintage range. So effectively that 15 inch drive unit is the same driver that we have in our flagship Vintage Fifteen.
We also have a full real wood cabinet. So this is a birch ply veneered real wood cabinet and we know how much the difference a cabinet a real wood cabinet adds to the sound quality. Visually they look very very similar but it’s what’s inside. So we’ve got much improved driver from the Vintage product. We’ve got a much improved crossover design which is fully Cryogenically treated again from the Vintage product. We’ve got slightly different cloth material. So the visual appearance is slightly different but you’ve got the same type of platform as the standard Classic product.
Then the flagship is effectively our Vintage. So this is where the luxury of the real wood solid American walnut, solid American trims, real high quality birch ply cabinet structure. It’s curved into this teardrop design which minimizes internal standing waves. It has a massive impact on the sound quality. So we’re talking real luxury here. So this is the flagship of what we do.
Cryogenically treated crossover, fully loaded, best quality components on the crossover. We have solid American Walnut in the front. We’ve got again the adjustments. So we’ve got the dial at the front for the presence adjustment. We’ve got an HF adjustment on the back. We’ve got all those features that we’ve got in the other ranges. But this is the luxury of what we do with Vintage.
What we’ve also recently launched over the last year or so is our additional core technology which is our SuperTrax super tweeter. And effectively this takes the same technology of the BassTrax port Tractrix profile, but we’ve inverted it upside down. So we we’re taking HF energy, harmonics, overtones, dispersed onto the 360 degree cone which fills the room maintaining the harmonic structure.
We launched a wooden version last year. We’ve got a black version that we’ve recently just launched. We also launched a new entry level super tweeter. This is called the S-Trax. Incorporates all the same technology. We’ve reduced some of the material costs. So the drive unit diaphragm is slightly different to the full-blown SuperTrax, but it means that we can now introduce a more affordable super tweeter to our Classic products and our other product ranges that we have in our portfolio.
Also wanted to show, this is our compact Vintage Five. One thing that we have achieved in the time that we’ve been in business is we haven’t just developed an IsoFlare drive unit. We’ve now got a number of different sizes from 5 inch, 6 inch, 8 inch, 10 inch, 12 inch, and to the big 15. So, it’s important to remember that we’re an engineering company and we develop beautiful looking cabinets, but we’ve got the high spec and high technology built into the cabinets.
If we look at the Vintage Five, we can turn the product round, and we have, again, this is the the flagship in the Vintage Classic Series. So, we’ve got the high quality WBT connections. We’ve also got the fifth terminal or the on this one, the third terminal, which is the grounding post. So, we can ground the chassis of the drive unit.
We have the presence adjustment on the front. So, we’ve got a certain amount of control over the midband with this particular model. And on the larger models, you’ve also got the HF adjustment as well.