Fasten your seatbelts, the F502SP are a thrill ride
Floorstanding stereo speakers | £4799 | whf.cm/F502SP
The ‘SP’ in the name stands for Special Production, which is Fyne Audio’s way of saying that these speakers are upgraded from the basic product. We’re not talking minor tweaks either, as the price difference between the standard F502 floorstanders (£2499) and our review pair of the Fyne Audio F502SP shows.
Essentially, Fyne Audio’s engineers have upgraded pretty much everything on the standard model while keeping to the same basic design and dimensions. Think of it as extreme ‘hot-rodding’. All SP models are hand-built in the UK, which accounts for some of the price differential too.
The standard F502 drivers are replaced by new designs that are derived from those used in the company’s high-end F700 range. Consider that the equivalent floorstander in the F700 range, the F702, comes in at around double the price of the F502SP and you will understand why sharing similar drive units is such a big thing for the cheaper product.
The heart of these speakers is the IsoFlare drive array, consisting of a 25mm horn-loaded magnesium tweeter sitting in the throat of a 20cm multi-fibre (paper) coned mid/bass unit. The idea is to create a point source, where all frequencies of sound seem to come from the same place. Contrast this with the conventional way of arranging driver units on a speaker where they are lined up on a front baffle. Think of the distance between the drive units and the uneven dispersion that causes, and the appeal of Fyne’s IsoFlare (and KEF’s Uni-Q) is clear. In the F502SP an additional 20cm woofer augments the bass output.
The three drivers are linked with an all-new, handmade crossover network made using high-quality inductors and ClarityCap capacitors. All internal cabling is silver-plated OFC van Den Hul rather than the no-name wires most rivals use. The crossover points are fairly standard at 1.7kHz between the mid/bass and tweeter with the lower bass driver rolling below 250Hz. Low frequencies are tuned by the company’s favoured downward firing port system, but in the SP version the port fires down into a substantial twin aluminium plinth structure – rather than the standard model’s wooden plinth – which has a built-in diffuser to spread bass energy evenly. The claim is not only that of deep and powerful bass but of less fussy integration into the listening room.
The SPs’ generous cabinet dimensions are the same as for t
