At Fyne Audio in Glasgow we unbox the newest entry-level loudspeakers, the F5E. As the compact little brother to the award-winning F501E, the F5E brings Fyne’s signature IsoFlare driver, FyneFlute cone technology, and BassTrax 360° bass system into an affordable bookshelf speaker. In this video, Richard Stevenson takes a close look at what comes in the box, explore the build quality and finish, and explain the clever wall-mounting options. If you’ve been curious about how much engineering goes into Fyne’s most accessible speaker, this unboxing is a must-watch.
Hi, we’re up here today at Fyne Audio in Glasgow and we are going to unbox the cute little F5E loudspeakers. This is the most affordable Fyne Audio pair of speakers you can yet buy. It’s part of a series. The F501E, which is a slimline floorstander, has recently won best overall speaker up to £1,000 in the What Hi-Fi Awards. Which we’re very pleased about. and this is its very little brother, the F5E.
Let’s get them out and have a look at it. They’re in an outer an outer packing case, like a sleeve can go over there. This is the inner box. Open these up and look what we’ve got in the pack here. So, top of the box, we have the instruction manual, which Fyne labels as Fyne advice. In there also is the small bumper feet. Little tiny rubber studs that stick on the bottom of the speaker so when you put them down on a surface, they don’t slide around. And we have two vertical mounting guides. These now the F5E can actually be wall hung if you want a really compact and discreet way of mounting them. And they come supplied with two little keyway brackets that can be bolted on the back. I’ll show you those in a second. And the idea is with this template, you can literally get them where you want them on the wall. Drill through the hole there. Put the screws in the wall (using suitable raw plugs depending what you need). And the speaker will just hang on that.
What else we have here? These are the brackets, the keyways that go on the back of the speaker. Obviously, you don’t if you’ve got them stand mounted or on a bookshelf, you’re not going to need those. So, here we have a pack of screws. These screw they’re wood screws. So, these screw these brackets to the back of the speaker. And then we have two grilles, magnetic mount grilles. Very nice. Let’s put that down there. The other one out there. What else do we have in here? We have these are, oh, these are more of these type of buffer blocks. And the idea is they’ll go on the wall. So, as there’s two points, if you nudge it, it’s actually fixed on the wall. they’ll stop the speaker just pivoting on these two, on these two brackets on the wall. So, it’s just to add a bit of security to how it’s mounted on the wall. So, we’ve got two sets of those, four in each. So, you put it on each corner of the speaker, hang it on the wall, it’ll be there really nice and solid. And that is our accessories pack.
Right, let’s get down into this box a bit further. Let’s have a look here. Cut the tape at the top. Right. And here we have the F5E. As I said, it is the entry level in the entry level range. So, this is Fyne’s most affordable loudspeaker with this rather neat little 5” / 125mm IsoFlare driver. You can see here you’ve got a 5 inch multi-fibre base cone. And in the centre of that, in the acoustic centre of it, time aligned, is the tweeter in the middle. Now, that is a 19mm titanium dome compression driver that is nicely tuned to work with that size of IsoFlare driver. And you see around here, you’ve got all this detailing. The way the roll surround has those little flutes in. So, that’s another Fyne technology called FyneFlute. Essentially, it’s dampening a lot of the excess vibrations in the cone to move, sort of distortion levels out of the range of hearing.
So, if you look down here, the BassTrax porting system. Now, that’s not just a slot port. If you look actually through, there is a small cone. The cabinet is ported downwards. So, the bass fires down onto the tractrix profile cone and actually radiates out of all four sides of the speakers. So it creates a plane wave 360° bass. Now the advantage of that over just direct bass is it actually because it sounds more like an instrument. So, you hit a drum, sound goes off in every direction. it doesn’t just come out at you one way. So it tries to emulate how bass sounds, you know, sound in real life with musical instruments. It also makes it a whole lot easier to put it in the room because you know what you’re getting out of each side and you’ll find where you position it, it becomes much less sensitive to room positioning. As of this year, every single range in the Fyne Audio range, all seven ranges are all IsoFlare driver, FyneFlute, and BassTrax. Let’s turn this one around and have a quick look at the back panel here.
What we have here is a rather nice premium set of 4mm binding posts. So, you can use banana plugs or spades or bare wire. I think for an entry- level speaker, this is a really nice touch with the gold plated terminals. Nice, really nice and solid. And if you can just see these little marks here, that is where the little bracket you see is literally a little keyway. So once you’ve put the hole in the wall, it’s dead easy. Mount those on the back and the whole speaker will literally just sit there, hang on the wall.
This is a black ash vinyl wrap. There is a walnut vinyl wrap coming later in 2026, but this is black only at the moment. It’s a nice neutral colour. It’s not a real high gloss black that’s going to show up all of the fingerprints. It is actually a nice satin finish wrap and I have to say one of the nicest wraps on a budget set of speakers I found. And it looks really nice in the flesh. Let me see what it looks like with a grille on. So no nasty holes or oolons I think as they’re called. Just clips on really nicely. And I think that is without going into too much technical detail, the beautiful little Fyne Audio F5E.