Inside the New Fyne Audio Factory: A Guided Tour with Managing Director Andrzej Sosna

Hello, I’m Andrzej Sosna, the Managing Director of Fyne Audio. I’d like to welcome you to our brand new facility here in Bellshill. We’re on a 20,000 ft² site and we’re going to take you inside in a minute and show you all the wonderful things that we’re doing in here.

Okay, you’re in the building now and we’re going to start here in our reception area. And as you see lined up here, we have an array of some of our products here. And we’ll be taking you through more information about all of these products later. So, we’re just going to take a walk through the office area into our new meeting room and into the new Dem area that Dr. Paul has voiced and got ready for all the developments we’re doing. In the Dem area, we have our Vintage and Classic range for a quick look through.

So, we’re going to go through here to the Demo Room. [Music] So, this is our Demo Room. Dr. Paul and his team use this for all the product development and evaluation. And you can see we have a some of our products lined up here for listening purposes. [Music] As you see, it’s a fairly large space. As I said, the whole area is 20,000 ft². This warehouse would be around 8,000 square ft of that.

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So, you’ll have seen from the the flyover video that we have solar panels on our roof. We got almost 200 panels up there. And all the energy from those panels comes down and it gets into these two inverters that are standing here right next to me. And it converts from DC to AC which we’ use in the factory. But the really cool thing about that is we’ve got really clean almost as clean as you can get energy going straight into our Dem room into our research labs which is absolutely fantastic for really good clean development and listening to their the sound that our speakers are making. Let’s move on. Okay, so we’re just going to move on through the finished goods warehouse.

As you can see, we have a fair amount of stock. It’s a fact of life in the audio world. We have to have stock. It’s a big investment for any audio business and it’s the same for us.

So, we’re entering our second warehouse area here. This is almost primarily component stores in here. So all the individual components we need to buy in that we then used to assemble into our loudspeaker. So could be metal work, could be electronic components, anything is is in this part of the warehouse. This segment of the warehouse is our manufacturing area here. So I’d like to to welcome you into this part. This is the most crucial part of the whole operation. So in here, it’s all individual stages of assembly here. So batch production, we have individual elements of the the product all made. So we’re going to take you through one by one just so you can see how we build up a loudspeaker. So Alec here is going to start assembling a driver so you can see the the steps required to pull a driver together. He’s pre prepared some of these components. We would normally have to prepare the magnets with through the magnetiser, which we’ll show you in a second. But why don’t you just watch Alec building a driver up?

So, that’s the frame, the chassis frame there that he’s already got together. He’s putting the pole piece inside there now.

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This is a torque setting. Torque certain value. Okay. So, we’ve got to set the the torque at a certain level.

So he’s now he’s now going to put a cone in here. So the cone we’ve already prepared this cone. We’ve added the voice coil. We’ve added the the spider to that cone. So the next stage is to is to actually glue that cone and position that cone in the driver. He’s got to add adhesive for the spider assembly.

And got to add adhesive for the surround. The surround goes on

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So the most crucial thing here is getting the the cone positioned really accurately inside the the chassis over the pole piece. So this is just one. We normally do a batch or five of these together. Then Alec will do the next stage of adding the HF assembly to that to create the full driver. That’s it. Crucial part. This is the beating heart of all of our Loudspeakers. So, one of the most crucial bits of assembly that we do. Thank you, Alex. These are all cones ready to go, built up, this is a 15in cone. But this has already been prepared by us. We already connected the spider and the voice coil to this to this cone. So, this is ready to go. This is the the crossover assembly right here. We got a lot of crossovers. Again, batch production here. We build all our own crossovers and we build them it’s a point-to-point system here. So we we don’t like circuit boards because circuit boards affect the actual audio quality mainly because of the closeness of of the of the tracks on the circuit boards. So we go for a a point-to-point system. It looks like it’s a bit rough and ready, but this board really helps in terms of keeping things in the right place and it has no acoustic interaction with the with the electronics. It’s designed, the spacing on this is very crucial, designed again by Paul. So, the spacing between the components, the connections, the tracks, the way the tracks are laid are also very important, what we’re trying to do is maximise the signal path here and minimise any interference and interactions between the components. This segment here is the cable harnesses. It’s very important inside a loudspeaker. You have lots of cables. So, we have to make those cables quality of the cable with the crimping and the connections to the cable. So we have a whole selection of crimping machines here, making sure those crimps go on correctly and again maximising the the current through there. So yeah, so lots of different cable harnesses. Every speaker has a slightly different length and number of cables and quality of cables. So again, doesn’t seem like it, but a lot of work involved in that. So this is our cryogenic area here. We’re one of the very very few audio manufacturers to have our own cryogenic facility here. And it’s something that that we’ve had since we started and we have done a lot of measurements on product with and without cryogenic treatment. So we know adding a cryogenic treatment improves the performance of the product. And what it’s doing there is it’s removing micro stresses that occur in the electronics. It’s really in the wiring or the crossover area particularly. You know, when you’re building it, you’re adding stresses by soldering and flexing all the wires and cables. Putting it in here de-stresses all of that and takes a lot of these micro stresses out, which means a cleaner signal going through the loudspeaker. Yeah, if I can just say this was in the beginning of its cycle, so the temperature had only reached – 118 there. Actually, now I’m looking at it. Well, it’s got -119 now. It’s on its way down to -150. And we keep it at -150 for a secret period of time and then we warm it back up again back to room temperature. So the whole cycle takes about 4 days. So it’s quite a long time. So we try and maximise what we can put in here because we’ve always got new product coming through to cycle through. So we need this process running all the time. Currently we have three final assembly build stages. So we go all through these various sub-asssembly areas and then we move into the final assembly here and got three different assemblies. Depends on the on the requirement how much throughput we need. Right now we just got one running and we’re building some Classic SP’s here.

You can see all the various parts I’ve been talking about. This is the wiring harness wiring inside here, the crossover down inside the product.

What we’re fitting here is the presence controls and the HF level controls. That’s another manufacturing operation that we that we do here to make this whole control assembly.

Once we’ve finished the full manufacturing assembly, I mean each of the the sub assemblies are all tested quality wise themselves and all checked as a special jig for testing every single sub assembly. But then we build it into the complete product. Once it’s built into the complete product, we have to test the complete product. And we have our own test booth for doing that very purpose. And here’s a product just about to head in. So we’ve got a special testing process here. All the distances are already checked all set with jigs already. So we don’t have to do any kind of alignment of that. And we’ve got a clear test kit in here. So once Kevin’s got this fully set up, we’ll do a complete frequency sweep using the Cleo system. It’s all stored on the on the laptop over there. So every product has its own kind of identity and it own record that we hold on the system. We register against the individual serial numbers. So if anything then subsequently happens and let’s face it occasionally it does. We’ve got a record of when we built a product, who built the product, our own tests so we can try and work out if something’s gone wrong, how it happened so we try and avoid it happening again.

So there’s a few different tests going on there, different adjustments because we’ve got controls, presence control, we got HF level control. We need to make sure it’s working at the full extremes of those controls.

This is the final quality check area and then packing and assembly area here. So, the partner for that product we just tested is just about to come through here. They’ll do a quality check. There’s a there’s a process for checking all the different areas where there might be a defect. This is a visual check at this point. Once it’s all okay, we’ll get it packed up and ready to go. So, we’ve got some goods just leaving at the moment and some other goods just arriving here. This is our main dispatch and receipt area for the business. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll walk outside to the yard. we’ve got out here. This is one of the reasons that we decided to buy this facility because it has a huge potential for expansion. If we need to grow the business and we need to expand the factory in in either this way or we could go up up the way. And so we got a lot of space here around us and this is a 50,000 ft² space on a 20,000 ft² building. So that tells you there’s a lot of space around the building.

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