Scotland’s own Fyne Audio did not just show up at the Bristol Hi-Fi Show in 2026; it took over, trading polite reserve for a dose of bold Highland swagger. Claiming Bristol Suite 1, the event’s largest demonstration space, the Ayrshire-based loudspeaker specialist marked its biggest presence ever at the annual show while unveiling expanded color options and custom finishes across select models. The company also confirmed full UK availability of its S-Trax super tweeter, broadening access to its high-frequency enhancement platform.

Systems on demonstration ranged from the award-winning F500E series to the flagship F704SP floorstanders paired with the S-Trax, powered by reference electronics from Accuphase and spinning vinyl on a Linn LP12 — because if you’re going to bring Scottish loudspeakers to Bristol, you might as well show up properly dressed and louder than the bagpipes at Hogmanay.

Any Color You Like If You Happen to Live in the UK

Fyne Audio has expanded its color and customization program for the F500SP Series under the Any Color You Like banner, giving UK buyers far more than the usual black, white, or walnut routine.

At the show, attendees and press previewed an expanded range of standard finishes across the F500SP models, along with a fully bespoke option. Customers can now order any F500SP loudspeaker in any RAL Classic color, matt or gloss, for a 30 percent SRP premium over standard finishes. The program is available exclusively through authorized Fyne Audio dealers in the UK.

Once a color is selected and a deposit placed, customers receive a painted swatch for final approval before production begins. Each pair is then painted to order, with delivery typically taking six to eight weeks from confirmation.

Pro tip: The F500S builds on the F500SP platform, incorporating the latest evolution of Fyne’s IsoFlare point source driver technology for improved clarity and dispersion.

S-Trax Super Tweeter

In addition to the Any Color You Like debut, Fyne Audio confirmed full UK dealer availability of its previously introduced S Trax omnidirectional super tweeter system. First unveiled in late 2025, S Trax is now shipping through Fyne’s premium retail network and was demonstrated at the Bristol Hi Fi Show paired with the F502S, giving listeners a clear sense of the added spatial scale and high frequency air it brings to performance systems.

S Trax sits below the flagship SuperTrax super tweeter launched in 2024 and is designed as a more accessible option, while the SuperTrax remains the more natural partner for Fyne’s F700 and F700SP loudspeaker models.

Fyne Audio S-Trax Specifications

Fyne Audio Speaker Technology

Across three active demonstration systems, visitors and press experienced the full scope of Fyne Audio engineering, from accessible, high value pairings of F55E loudspeakers with WiiM streaming electronics to reference level IsoFlare point source designs driven by Accuphase amplification and a dedicated vinyl front end.

Fyne Audio’s presence at the Bristol Hi Fi Show focused on demonstrating the complete philosophy behind its point source loudspeaker technology. Through IsoFlare drivers, FyneFlute surrounds, and BassTrax porting, the systems highlighted the brand’s central objective: coherent, room filling musical realism achieved through engineering precision and purposeful design.

Comparison

The Bottom Line 

With its largest ever presence at the Bristol Hi Fi Show, Fyne Audio made it clear that engineering alone is no longer the whole story. The Any Color You Like program opens the door for UK customers to step outside the traditional safe finishes that have long defined British loudspeakers. For once, it is not just about walnut, black, or polite understatement. It is about matching serious acoustic performance with a cabinet that does not look like it was designed to apologize for itself.

Right now, that freedom belongs to UK buyers willing to pay the premium and wait for a made to order finish. If the response is strong, it would not be surprising to see the initiative expand. But as it stands, Fyne has handed its home market something rare in British hi fi: the chance to keep the stiff upper lip in the listening chair while letting the loudspeakers show a bit of personality.

Price & Availability

NOTE: Fyne Audio’s Any Color You Like option is only available in the UK. The regular color models are available at Upscale Audio in the U.S.

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TCL is taking another swing at making phone screens easier on the eyes. At MWC 2026, the company unveiled the next generation of its Nxtpaper display technology, this time built on an AMOLED panel.

It delivers the rich colors and contrast people expect from OLED displays while maintaining the paper-like viewing comfort that Nxtpaper screens are known for. TCL says this upgrade reduces eye fatigue during long reading, browsing, or streaming sessions on smartphones.

Inside TCL’s next-gen Nxtpaper AMOLED display

NXTPAPER began as TCL’s answer to the problem of screen fatigue. Earlier versions appeared mainly on LCD-based devices. But the new version moves the tech onto AMOLED, bringing deeper contrast and brighter visuals while keeping the comfort features intact.

According to TCL, there are three major upgrades this time. First, the display reaches a 90% circular polarization rate, reducing glare significantly. Second, blue light purification technology lowers blue light emissions by 15%, dropping them to as low as 2.9%.

The third element is adaptive display tuning. The screen automatically adjusts brightness and color temperature to match surrounding lighting conditions. It also follows natural light patterns through the day, which supports healthier circadian rhythms for users.

To keep the screen comfortable for long sessions, TCL layers several technologies on top of the AMOLED panel. The panel includes an anti flare coating and a light homogenizing film that improves the reading experience, especially in the e-reader mode. These layers help soften reflections and create a more paper-like visual texture.

The display can reach peak brightness of 3200 nits and supports 100% coverage of the P3 color gamut, so the images and videos appear more accurate and vibrant. It also supports a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and animations. Color performance is another focus.

TCL plans to launch its first AMOLED Nxtpaper smartphone before the end of the year. Meanwhile, it has already introduced the NXTPAPER 70 Pro phone with a paper-like display and stylus support.

The housing doesn’t feel too cheap or too luxurious. It’s toylike, but not in a chintzy way. The unit can run on three AA batteries (a set is included) or on the included USB-A to DC adapter (you’ll need your own wall charger). The included instruction manual helps you make sense of what the heck all the knobs, levers, buttons, and lights mean.

You’ll start with the sequencer, which is where you’ll find a selection of hundreds of premade melodies with or without drum beats. Then you’ll use the other controls to manipulate this sound. The tempo lever controls the speed, the AMP(lifier) release controls how long or short each note is, and the filter lever adds or removes frequencies from the sounds you’re generating. There are also buttons for kick and snare drums to add percussion. An entire area of knobs and buttons is dedicated to sound modulation using either Low Frequency Oscillators or Modulation Envelopes.

That array already gives you a lot of control, but the BlipBlox After Dark also has two buttons that throw chance into the music-making mix: a Randomize button that resets everything (and saves the current settings, so you can press and hold it to go back to the most recent settings and parameters), and a Soundfreak button that adds a random sound or effect to whatever is currently playing. The latter button in particular is very entertaining to press.

It was fun sitting down and just winging it. I felt a little bit like Charli XCX at her Boiler Room set and a little bit like 8-year-old me trying to figure out how to make my church choir’s keyboard sound more like the chords in the background of Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U.” I tested this machine heavily during the week I quit nicotine, and it was a welcome distraction. I lost hours just fiddling with it, trying to see what sounds I could elicit.

I realized at one point that this must have been how my friends felt during quarantine. I might not have had patch cables or seven rows of modules or whatever spark makes Fred Again … himself, but I could make the womp … womp … womp … noise turn into different womps, and damn if that wasn’t the neatest thing in the entire world at that moment in time.

Button Mashing

The instruction manual does have some really good information that could answer all my burning questions, and there are YouTube videos galore that show you how to navigate the controls.

In the manual you’ll find a signal flow map, which helpfully shows exactly what the electrical signals are doing inside the unit, and how to manipulate them at any point. There are also detailed notes on what each button and component of synthesis does.

• SLSH is recruiting women to increase effectiveness of social engineering on IT helpdesks
• Applicants are paid between $500 and $1,000 per call depending on success
• Participants must pass screening questions and follow a scripted set of instructions

The notorious hacker group Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, also known as SLSH, is reportedly recruiting women to improve the effectiveness of its social engineering operations.

Telegram posts dated February 22 and collected by Dataminr indicate the group is offering payments between $500 and $1,000 per call, depending on “success and hit rate.”

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Starlink is getting ready to launch its second generation of satellites, and it’s expected to match the speeds of a traditional terrestrial network. During a keynote at Mobile World Congress, Starlink execs detailed the roadmap for the company’s upgrade towards the next generation of satellites called V2.

“The goal of Starlink Mobile … is to provide a terrestrial-like connectivity when you’re connected to the satellite system,” Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s senior vice president of Starlink engineering, said during the MWC keynote. “In the right conditions, it should look and feel like you’re connected to a high-performing 5G terrestrial network.”

Nicolls detailed that the V2 satellite constellation could offer download speeds up to 150 Mbps in ideal conditions, comparing it to a broadband experience. According to Starlink, next-gen satellites will offer 100 times the data density of its predecessors, which should help users with faster streaming and browsing as well as more reliable voice calls. Notably, Nicolls added that the V2 satellite constellation would offer better coverage to Earth’s polar regions, which are known to have unreliable coverage with traditional networks.

Nicolls said that SpaceX is planning to send out more than 50 V2 satellites on each SpaceX launch starting in mid-2027, with a goal of building out a full constellation in six months. Outside its MWC presser, Starlink also announced a partnership with German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom. The partnership would help Deutsche Telekom address internet coverage gaps in Europe using Starlink’s constellation, starting in 2028.

There are many chess robots, most of which require the human player to move the opposing pieces themselves, or have a built-in mechanism that can slide the opposing pieces around to their new location. Ideally, such a chess robot would move the pieces just like how a human would, of course. That’s pretty much the promise behind the Manya Cynus chess robot, which [Matt] over at the Techmoan YouTube channel bought from the Kickstarter campaign.

Advertising itself as a ‘Portable AI Chess Robot’, the Manya Cynus chess robot comes in the form of a case that unfolds into a chess board and also contains the robotic arm that contains the guts of the operation. Powered by the open source Stockfish chess engine, it can play games against a human opponent at a few difficulty levels without requiring any online connectivity or a companion app. It moves its own pieces by picking up the metal-cored chess pieces with its arm, while its front display tries to display basic emotions with animated eyes. A 3-MP downward-facing camera is located on the head section, along with a microphone.

As for how well it works, [Matt] isn’t the best chess player, but he had a fair bit of fun with the machine. His major complaints circle around how unfinished the firmware still feels, with e.g., invalid moves basically ignored with only a barely visible warning popping up on the screen. In general, he’d rather classify it as an interesting development kit for a chess robot, which is where the BLE 5.1-based interface and a purported Python-based development environment provided by Manya seem to come into focus.

From the site, it’s not clear where this documentation and software can be found, and the chess robot appears to be fully sold out on the Kickstarter page. In addition to this, a promised companion app seems to have gone AWOL, too.

With no clear support or even availability, it would seem that this is less of a crowdfunding scam and more of a confusing product which may or may not become available again, yet which could perhaps provide inspiration to some DIY projects, as the basic principle seems sound enough. Or, keep it simple and use a gantry.