Philips Fidelio FA3 review

If you want a decent pair of active stereo speakers, you’re not short of options. The compact and affordable Ruark MR1 Mk3 (£399 / $579 / AU$899) and Onkyo GX-30ARC (£339 / $349 / AU$649), not to mention the more costly KEF Coda W (£799 / $1000 / AU$1450), have delivered ably on the promise of that signature stereo speaker sound and design combined with built-in amplification, Bluetooth streaming and plenty of physical connections.

Now it’s the turn of Philips and its active Fidelio FA3 speakers to see if it can muscle in on this market. At around £349 / $399 / AU$499, the FA3 cost around the same money as their Onkyo and Ruark competitors, and while the Ruarks derive much of their appeal from their compact size and engaging musicality, the Onkyo earned a five-star haul thanks to their solid performance and outstanding versatility. The bigger KEF Coda W, meanwhile, are for anyone wanting a significant step-up in sound quality for a more sizeable sum.

Lots of bases covered then, and all leading to one important question: do the Fidelio FA3 offer anything that their class-leading rivals don’t already have covered?

Build & design

The Fidelio FA3 are on the larger side of what you’d generally find from a pair of active speakers at this price – if anything, they could pass for a pair of dedicated hi-fi standmounts. Standing around 30cm tall, they dwarf their 22cm high Onkyo GX-30ARC rivals, all while making the 18.5cm Ruark MR1 Mk3 look titchy by comparison.

They’re big beasts, but not poorly made. The overall standard of construction feels admirable, while the main body of the speakers shines proudly thanks to its glossy black finish. That gloss black exterior gives the FA3 a somewhat flashy aesthetic, even if it leaves them susceptible to the ignominy of grubby fingermarks. Oh, and we hope you like that colourway, because it’s the only one currently available.

Unlike their key competitors, the Fidelio FA3 eschew a master and slave configuration – whereby one speaker takes the power and shares it through a wired cable connection to its companion – in favour of both units receiving power via two separate sockets. That can cause its own issues, as you’ll need two available plug sockets to keep your speakers firing, and the provided power cables are a little on the short side at around 140cm each.

The primary speaker houses the lion’s share of the inputs and buttons, including a power button, volume dial and source selector, with both speakers sporting a small LED indicator at the bottom. It’s nice to have those colour-changing LEDs displaying which source you’ve selected, but wouldn’t it have been more user-friendly to have mounted the volume dial at the front of one of the boxes? As it is, it’s just a small dial hidden on the primary speaker’s back panel.

The FA3 speakers come with a dedicated remote control for selecting your desired inputs, adjusting volume, managing playback and tweaking levels of treble and bass, and while that remote is a little plasticky, it’s about what we’d expect for this price. There’s also a set of magnetically attachable oval grilles which cover the core drive units rather than the whole of each speaker’s frontage, a smart decision which preserves the FA3’s overall aesthetic.

Inside, each speaker is fed by 50 watts of Class D power, with dedicated internal amplifiers powering a 25mm titanium dome tweeter and a 12.7cm glass-fibre mid/bass unit in pursuit of “breathtaking dynamics and soundstaging”. Bass performance, as you’ll discover when you turn your speakers around, is tuned by a large rear port on each unit.

Features

For simple convenience, Bluetooth is the only way you’ll get a wireless connection going from your system to your source device, with standard AAC and SBC living alongside the higher quality LDAC codec if you have a compatible source.

Physical connections include RCA stereo inputs alongside an optical input, as well as a USB-C option if you want to connect directly to your laptop or smartphone. For integration with a television, the Fidelio FA3 also feature an HDMI ARC port.

That’s a reasonably solid variety of connections, even if a lack of a standalone 3.5mm aux input, a sub out or any phono stage for connecting a turntable means Philips lags behind the comprehensive suite provided by the do-it-all Onkyo GX-30ARC.

The speakers themselves can be connected to each other wirelessly or via a coaxial cable. All digital input sources will be able to handle files up to 24-bit/192kHz, but regardless of input, note that the Philips speaker will downsample all incoming hi-res files to a maximum of 24-bit/96kHz resolution.

For taking charge of your Fidelio FA3 and tinkering with the finer points of your experience, you’ll want to get a hold of the Philips Entertainment app. Here, you’ll discover a reasonably wide range of handy boons, including an in-depth seven-band equaliser and a digitally mapped alternative to the physical remote control.

Sound

We kick off our testing by sampling the FA3’s Bluetooth powers, streaming music from Tidal after placing the speakers onto our office desk.

The sound we receive is powerful and meaty, but that meatiness comes with a good deal of fat at the low end that could do with some serious trimming. Whether it’s Goose’s funky So Ready, Hans Zimmer’s epic Why Do We Fall? or Radiohead’s refined Reckoner, the speakers sound loose and ill-disciplined, with a heavy-handed bass that lacks much perceptible precision or clarity.

Voices come through with ample expressiveness, and we detect a real keenness and full-bodied bite through what is an admirably detailed midrange. This isn’t a crisp or nimble sound, but the speakers’ weighty and impressively cinematic approach does give genuine muscle to Why Do We Fall? to give the titanic track a real feeling of epic drama.

The problem is that lower end. The deep bass plucks at the start of So Ready, for instance, don’t sound much like any instrument in particular, and while we’re aware that something is being played, and that it comes from the lower registers, there’s little evidence that this is the unmistakably resonant twang of a bass guitar.

Tinkering with the provided equaliser can take a bit of the overzealousness out of the lower end, but it can’t rectify what is clearly a fundamentally ill-defined and imprecise sound. Yes, there’s punch to the sound, but it’s more the imprecise thwack of a 20oz heavyweight glove as opposed to the razor sharp jab of a dancing featherweight.

This is all a little disheartening, so we lunge for the safety of a USB-C cable to see if we can put some pep into the Fidelio FA3s’ step. It’s a good decision, and while the Philips system’s core character remains, we find that those defects are slightly mitigated by the introduction of a good old-fashioned wire tether hooked up to our Lenovo Thinkpad laptop.

Everything sounds tighter and clearer through this wired connection, allowing what is an admirably detailed midrange to shine more clearly, and while that bass is still as overbearing as a strict mother turning up to her daughter’s first disco, it does at least have greater shape and precision this time around. There’s more space around the notes played, with music hanging together in a less slipshod manner – it’s far from perfect, but better than before.

A little more encouraged by the FA3’s USB-C performance, we recruit the services of our trusty Cyrus CDi CD player into the Philips’ RCA stereo input, discovering that the system is capable of accommodating a far more talented source player than a standard work laptop.

Moving over to the optical input shows the Philips’ DAC is a respectable one, even if we still discern a noticeable drop-off in performance when switching from the talented Cyrus’ DAC to that of the Philips. That’s not entirely surprising, as the Cyrus CDi, while advancing in its years, will still set you back around £1000.

Regardless of source, though, the Fidelio FA3 doesn’t have the chops to challenge the best in class. Admittedly, the powered Ruark MR1 Mk3 speakers sound smaller than the FA3, but they’re also a far subtler, sweeter and more expressive proposition than their larger rivals, bending and flexing to accommodate the mood and feel of a wide musical spectrum rather than simply barraging us with a somewhat shouty, route-one approach.

Similarly, the Onkyo GX-30ARC don’t have the burly sonic brawn of the Fidelio FA3, but those shortcomings are easily remedied by a clearer, cleaner sound and a more dextrous handling of those key bass frequencies.

Whichever competitor we compare the Philips with, it simply sounds too sonically unsubtle to compete with the class leaders – less a trained chorister in an airy chapel, more a merry football fan belting out Sweet Caroline on the terraces.

Verdict

The Philips Fidelio FA3 have their moments. They can sound bold, powerful and muscular for what is a pretty modest outlay, with a solid array of connectivity options granting decent versatility for the money.

The problem for the FA3 is that price-comparable rivals tend to give you more bang for your buck. Whether it’s the more comprehensive suite of connections from the Onkyo GX-30ARC or the sonically superior Ruark MR1 Mk3, we’re struggling to see where the Fidelio fit into the current landscape.

SCORES

• Sound 3
• Build 4
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Ruark Audio MR1 Mk3

Also consider the Onkyo GX-30ARC

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