Trade-focused reviewer, Richard Stevenson, lends an ear to the Lyngdorf Audio FR-2 line of loudspeakers.
Loudspeakers are often the most compromising or compromised part of AV system design. The layout dictates placement, the customer dictates aesthetics, and the project budget dictates both performance and how much wall area you can hijack and realistically make visually disappear. Then there is boundary gain, limited enclosure volume and trying to match tweeter height to ear height, all to end up hoping the customer is seven feet tall and likes sitting on a barstool.
Freestanding speakers can solve a whole lot of those issues, often simultaneously making a visual carnage of the finely-crafted decor brief.
It’s this conundrum that makes Lyngdorf’s new FR-2 such an interesting proposition. It’s a loudspeaker built for rooms where traditional floor-standers are too intrusive on the aesthetic, in-walls are out of the question and clients still want the sort of full-bodied sound performance that makes their system feel ‘audiophile’.
The FR-2 trump card here is that it is a sophisticated freestanding loudspeaker in a slim, décor-friendly form, engineered from the outset to perform its best almost flush to a wall. In fact, it can be pushed very close to a wall on its spiked feet, given a little more stability on its supplied metal outriggers or simply mounted to the wall.
Lyngdorf calls the FR-2 a ‘full-range on-wall loudspeaker,’ but that rather undersells the engineering. At just 16cm deep, the cabinet occupies a fraction of the ‘visual volume’ of a conventional floorstander and can sit at the very rear of a room without demanding any form of stud-wall recessing. For UK installers, where many media rooms have to double as living rooms, or if the walls are brick, it’s a very promising solution.
Aesthetically, the FR-2 runs with Lyngdorf’s Scandinavian heritage without leaning clinical, and it’s made and lacquer-finished in several standard colours in Denmark. The fit and finish reflect old-school attention to cabinet craft with clean lines and sharp edges softened just enough to blend in. Exchangeable fabric inserts on the top panel and front grille give a wide range of colour combinations as standard. Lyngdorf has also teamed up with distributor Redline’s professional CI paint shop, which I can personally vouch for with my Q-Acoustics’ satin white Velodyne sub.
Installers can therefore offer customers specific RAL or car-paint options along with a draper’s shop range of grille cloth materials and colours. Our satin white sample with grey inserts looked sophisticated, although Ferrari Red with White grille cloth would have been on my personal order form.
Speaker set-up can be as simple as finding a suitable spot against a wall, connecting single-wired speaker cables to the amp and pressing play. The low terminal positions don’t make connection that easy with anything but smaller-gauge bare-end wire and the operation gets tight with chunky premium residential speaker cables or sticky-out banana plugs. Your mileage and connection choices may vary.
The FR-2’s ability to live right up against a boundary is only possible because Lyngdorf has voiced the entire speaker around that reality. Its low-frequency alignment, cabinet tuning and crossover contour are all shaped with the expectation of boundary gain. While you could stop there, Lyngdorf is very keen to point out that its own RoomPerfect EQ system will aid further still and supplied our test pair of FR-2s with the equally fine-looking Lyngdorf TDAI- 2210 digital amplifier with its own calibration mic to prove the point.
While not specifically on review here, the TDAI-2210 and Lyngdorf’s control app get a solid 10/10 for ease of use, funky features, sophisticated looks and RoomPerfect doesn’t require separate PC software. It makes some very peculiar noises if you are used to typical Audyssey / Dirac / Arc test tones!
Living On The Edge!
The first notable result, made all the more obvious by switching from floorstanders in the room, is a dramatic increase in room floorspace. The floorstanders stood proud of the back wall, making the room feel significantly more spacious and practical. As I have an 85in TV on the wall, the whole system felt much more part of the room than my usual AV mash-up of test kit. Cool!
Sonically, the FR-2s and RoomPerfect create some serious magic together, that manages to all but eliminate the ‘claggy’ bass and two-dimensional soundstage that pushing normal floor standers up against the back wall creates. The speakers are bonkers–punchy in the LF without blooming, and the detail and sound staging are right up there with some of the best floor standers at the price.
The FR-2s and TDAI-2210 are a great double act overall. Smooth, punchy, sophisticated and a host of other phrases I usually reserve for Hi-Fi mags – they work so well together. Switching the RoomPerfect on/off reveals a lot about the FR-2s as the sound remains every bit as open and uncongested with the EQ off. The voicing on the FR-2s 100% stand up to their against-wall placement regardless of amplification, yet turning RoomPerfect back on simply polishes the sound and soothes out the last vestiges of bass-smearing from the boundary gain.
This makes the FR-2 possibly one of the most easily deployable loudspeakers I have ever had the pleasure to clap ears on. It will suit the widest range of client rooms with minimal disruption or additional studwork, and I can see it working anywhere the client wants a big sound while maximising the spacious feel of the room. Switching back to traditional floorstanders in their usual spot, my 20sqm listening room felt immediately more compact and cluttered. Dammit.
In smaller rooms or even contemporary open-plan living spaces where floor space is at a premium, the FR-2 delivers grown-up Hi-Fi without encroaching on furniture placement. In media rooms, I can easily see them delivering punchy TV sound and audiophile tunes as the content dictates, in something that is possibly one of the slickest, simplest stereo/ AV crossover systems I can think of. I did think a horizontal, wall-mount-only LCR version for positioning below the screen might add further to the system’s flexibility, but perhaps that is just re-complicating an issue that the FR-2s have so neatly uncomplicated.
For the high percentage of clients that say they want ‘good sound but nothing too big,’ the FR-2 is the perfect solution. It hits a sweet spot of performance and practicality that few loudspeakers genuinely occupy, delivering a high-performance, visually-unobtrusive, simple to install near-wall solution without the typical sonic penalties.
Mix in the great standard colour combinations of cabinet and grill, the fully custom finish options from Redline, the added magic of the TDAI-2210 and RoomPerfect, and this makes for a complete overall production. The fact that Lyngdorf has then managed to ice this cake with one of the best audio control apps on the market, is frankly showboating! Mind you, I think I might just be bitter and twisted as the listening room feels 25% smaller than it did when the Lyngdorf system was here.
