Forgive me for mentioning this link twice (I put it in the "OT" thread), but I just read in the "Mrs. Ninja's favorite speaker" thread that you like the horns because they remind you of the beautiful, vintage designed speakers. I mentioned that I really like some of the modern vintage reproductions available from Tannoy, for example.

This link is not to a vintage speaker, but to a new lovely integrated amp from Gramofone in the UK. I saw a full page ad in the latest Listen magazine, the classical music magazine published by www.arkivemusic.com (the magazine link, I may as well put that up, too, is www.listenmusicmag.com in case anyone is interested in good music).

I think this is a beautiful design for an integrated amp to display with good taste in any room. My wife believes it has an off the top of the chart WAF rating. I've always been really surprised at why more amp makers don't market their amps in more attractive packages. There are differences, of course, among amps and brands, but essentially all amps look the same. Once in a while someone makes an attempt at change, the Peachtree Decco comes to mind... and that retro styled receiver (I can't think of the name). There is a little more interesting choices with tube amps, of course.

Many of the tube amps are quite attractive. I can't think of the link here now (and I don't want to go looking for it) but I mentioned it a long time ago on the AV123 forum -- it's somebody (I think they're in Ireland -- just off the top of my head) that has a tube amp design and he posts dozens (maybe hundreds) of customer pictures of how they custom built their version of the same amp. It's very interesting to browse through all of the pictures if you can find them because it shows the remarkable creativity in different people around the world building the same amp.

I'm surprised that some of the amp manufacturers haven't offered more interesting (entertaining?) looking amps. An amp has to look like an amp and a speaker has to look like a speaker. Boxes, boxes, boxes. There are some interesting speaker box alternatives on the DIY full-range speaker websites that are very creative looking.

After working on a couple DIY speaker projects I had mentioned to Sean that I was surprised that more speaker manufacturers didn't use External Crossovers. Think how easy it would make upgrades and mods, for example. You could unplug one whole crossover and plug in an upgrade... just like that... and later on when you could afford the next level upgrade, just unplug the old one and plug in the new one... sell the old one. Or you could replace a part easily, for example, one cap with an upgrade cap, since the crossover is right there in front of you.

The Hawthorne Audio Silver Iris speakers, for example, come with an attractive crossover mounted on a nice looking piece of wood. You can hide them in the back if you want, or since they look nice (at least to people who are really into audio as a hobby) they also look nice if you set them on a shelf. (One of the projects I was working on in the past was a modern design that I had thought about making for a local art gallery in Washington. The crossover was to be mounted artsy-like on the exterior of the speaker... but not in just one place, the individual parts were to be all over the place, here and there, connected by hand wiring, of course, with different colored wires. The caps were to be colorful, the inductor, of course, was going to be the most dramatic one I could find to fit the bill. I thought just having wires and parts all over the outside of this ultra-modern looking speaker would be interesting.)

I guess that's about it. Here's the link -- http://www.gramofone.co.uk/integrated-amplifiers.html -- I couldn't gleam a lot of specific information -- like price, dealers, etc. -- from their web site. If anyone else can, please post it here for the rest of us. I think this is the Tannoy link -- www.tannoy.com -- or, possibly, www.tannoy.co.uk -- I'm not sure. I'm using Mozilla tonight because I had to upgrade my old something v.6 to msn's latest v.8 in order to view pictures on the gramofone website -- and I couldn't because I kept getting a message that a file was missing. What happened to it and where to get it, I don't know. So, an option was to upgrade Mozilla which our son put on here as a backup for when MSN goes bye-bye. My old microsoft home page had all my "favorites" websites and links.

Anyway to make a shortstory even longer, if you have a chance and you like the beautiful old vintage speaker look, take a few minutes to browse the Tannoy website and get down to their bigger speakers and more expensive speakers... the classic speaker look.

If you have any other beautiful speaker links, post them here for all to enjoy. I remember on the AV123 forum we had dozens listed... most of them were very expensive... and more than a few were really strange looking and made you think, "Criminey, what were they thinking?" Enjoy!