Fyne FSE Bookshelf Speaker Review: A Fyne Effort

Price

In the UK, the F5E retails for £400. At the time of writing (August 2025), it has yet to go on sale in either the USA or Australia so there is no confirmed pricing for it in those regions as yet.

When looking at the Fyne Audio range, more care needs to be taken than is often the case. For example, as well as the F5E you see here, there is an F5S as well. This is extremely similar to the F5E but beefs up various components in the driver array and the cabinets to extract more performance and then proceeds to offer more finishes.

If you are looking at what you think is the right speaker online but the price isn’t right, it won’t hurt to re-check the model number.

Design

• Compact and discrete
• Only available in black
• Option to wall mount

The F5E has some styling present in the design but the reason it looks like it does is overwhelmingly down to the technology in use inside it. The result is a speaker that might best be described ‘neat but sober.’

For some people, the result might be seen as a little dull but this cuts both ways because one person’s ‘dull’ is quite a few more people’s ‘unobtrusive’ and this is not a speaker that is going to sit in spaces in a way that screams ‘look at me!’

The Fyne feels like a speaker where you have paid for the drivers and supporting hardware. The cabinet is there to keep everything in place and not much more.

Part of the reason for this is that the F5E is only available in black. If you are only going to offer one colour, black is a decent enough choice but it is a little limiting. Compared to what Q Acoustics and Wharfedale offer at this sort of price, it leaves the F5E feeling a little bit limited.

One area where the Fyne has an advantage over those rivals though is placement. As well as being quite unfussy about horizontal surfaces, the F5E can be easily wall mounted.

Fyne supplies the hardware to do this and, at under four kilos each, even the flimsiest new build stud wall should be able to handle them. If this is something you are keen to do with your speakers, the F5E has a head start on most rivals.

Specification

• IsoFlare concentric driver
• FyneFlute driver surround
• BassTraxx porting system
• Some limits to bass and sensitivity

The big news for the F5E is that it has the same type of driver arrangement as other, more elaborate, members of the Fyne Audio family. All of them make use of a concentric tweeter in the throat of the midbass driver which Fyne calls IsoFlare.

It’s a configuration that has some clear benefits. For starters, the cabinet can have smaller number of large perforations in it, helping with rigidity.

Placing the drivers this way also helps their relationship with each other. They disperse on the same axis which should help with phase and time alignment. The tweeter can radiate energy better because the midbass driver can be used as a ‘free’ waveguide rather than needing one to be added to the cabinet.

Fyne Audio also advocate for a degree of horn loading in their tweeters which can be achieved by setting the tweeter back in the mid/bass phase plug.

The driver itself is a 125mm unit made of a material that Fyne describes as ‘multi fibre’ (not quite paper but not wood either). At the centre of this, you’ll find a 19mm titanium dome compression tweeter; a very unusual material to find at this price point. It’s very closely related to what you see in more expensive models. These crossover at a relatively low 1.8kHz.

Around the edge of this driver, you’ll also find a technology called ‘FyneFlute’. This is designed to avoid unwanted energy being reflected back down the driver by using a surround that – according to Fyne at least – uses “variable geometry, within the computer designed fluting, to eliminate mis-termination effects and reduce colouration.” 

It looks a bit ‘busy’ (and I have no trouble saying that I think FyneFlute is a slightly silly name) but it seems to be effective and it further tightens up the relationship between the F5E and its bigger relatives.

One other piece of dedicated Fyne Audio hardware is also present. Rather than a conventional bass port, it uses a system called BassTraxx. This is a downward firing internal port that acts against a cone that pushes air through an all-round series of vents at the base of the cabinet.

The intention is that it ensures Fyne speakers are unaffected by proximity to walls which makes them easier to place. As well as doing this it also helps to strengthen the bond between this affordable speaker and its bigger relatives.

These engineering decisions do have some knock on effects which shape what the F5E can and – perhaps more pertinently – cannot do. For starters the internal volume of the F5E is on the small side. The cabinet itself is 270 x 174 x 228mm which is smaller than most rivals as it is but at least 5cm of the height is the BassTraxx assembly which reduces the volume of the enclosure holding the drivers down to one of the smaller examples going.

This means two things. The first is that this isn’t a bass monster. Fyne Audio quotes 55Hz – 38kHz at a +/- 6dB measurement which is down on most other £400 options. This is not and never will be a bass monster.

The second is that, while some big Fyne Audio speakers are very sensitive indeed, the F5E doesn’t really meet this criteria. The quoted sensitivity of 87dB/w feels very honest and it doesn’t mean that the Fyne is hard to drive but, compared to some of the company’s other models, it will need more power in day-to-day use.

Sound Quality

• Enough bass to convince
• Spectacular stereo imaging
• Might be a little aggressive in some situations
• Excellent for TV viewing

Having lived with the F5E for quite a while before writing this review, I think it is fair to begin this section by saying that, if you need to feel your music as much as hear it, the F5E is probably not going to be the speaker for you. It has beaten its quoted figure this room by about 5Hz but this still isn’t the sort of thing that is going to make your eyes wobble.

The thing is though… it’s enough. The urgent title track from In This Light and on This Evening by Editors, the Fyne Audio puts enough of that pulsing restless bassline into the track to make it sound as potent as it should. The effect is helped by the bass that the F5E being well integrated into the rest of the frequency response.

The result is that what you hear never sounds truly lightweight unless you happen to be running the Fyne next to a heftier pair of speakers (and if you are doing that, maybe you should listen to those instead).

Once you’re comfortably above 80Hz though, the Fyne starts to do things that other speakers at this price (and even quite a way beyond) can struggle to match. The F5E delivers a stereo image that is almost holographic in its ability to immerse the listener and convince you that something approaching the real thing is happening in front of you.

Put any care into how the speakers are placed relative to your listening position and they simply vanish into a soundstage that is both exceptionally even from left to right and that has no gap in the centre but that also generates an exceptional feeling of depth. The IsoFlare driver system really can do some impressive things.

There’s plenty of detail on offer too. Listening to Poppy Ackroyd’s lovely Resolve, the Fyne picks up on the wholly unique way in which Ackroyd uses a piano (her ‘playing’ extends to far more than pushing the keys) and the tracks are sprinkled with the little extra sounds and effects that result from doing this.

This is a fine recording and it works well with the titanium tweeter to sound energetic without tipping over into forward. With less well recorded material, this does mean that there have been points where the Fyne is more aggressive than rivals like Q Acoustics and Wharfedale but, so long as a little bit of care and attention is put into partnering them, this should not be an insurmountable issue.

Something that the Fyne absolutely excels at though is being used to partner a TV. Putting together a combination of a WiiM Amp Pro and the resident Philips 65 OLED909 TV created something that is able to do justice to the huge scale of Apple TV+’s Foundation while being every bit as happy at smaller scale, dialogue driven material.

It consistently does a great  job of anchoring events on screen in a way that is enjoyable and impressive. There is the added appeal that someone with a wall mounted screen could use the wall mounting hardware of the F5E to get them up on either side and have a system that took up very little room, sounded more than decent while it did so.

Should you buy it?