Ugly vs Gogeous speakers

My two cents worth is this: The sound is important, the look is important.  Why not have both?  Good sounding ugly speakers (or amps etc) ... just pass them buy.  We are spoiled for choice at the present time, so we can have our cake and eat it too.

Sonus faber is the most beautiful hands down end of discussion. The Franco Serblin models. Game over!

the lower end of the Wilson line up reminds me of amusement park trash cans from the fifties and sixties........ butt ugly.

When I retired my Dahlquist DQ10s and replaced them with a pair of ML reQuests, my friend said: "I like these new ones - I thought those other speakers were ugly as sin."

An amusing statement coming from a guy that doesn't have a single piece of matching furniture in his home, let alone a decorating scheme.

Different strokes, I 'spose.  ;-)

While I certainly like the speakers, like Sonus, that are fine furniture as well as sound reproducers, the question that always comes to mind is whether an audiophile with limited means (whether having a budget of $1,000 or $100,000) wishes to spend money on sound, appearance, or both, with the corollary that anything significant given to appearance usually means less spent on performance.

I’ve had odd looking speakers - the Spica Angelus looked rather like a couple of nuns staring at you - but I admired Vandersteen’s approach - put the maximum effort into performance and then wrap a sock over it so it looks at least acceptable, albeit a bit reminiscent of the monoliths in 2001 A Space Odyssey.

I have large Wilsons that do look a bit like something out of the Alien movies, and I made the mistake of sticking the grilles on them just as a way of keeping them safe while I was setting up the room (never do this - convincing a wife that they have to come off for listening is very difficult once she knows they have grilles!)

I guess there is a balance between aesthetics and sound, but I come down on the sound side. But if someone abandoned a pair of Sonus on my doorstep, I wouldn’t hesitate to haul them inside!