Ugliest speakers

WAF, or wife acceptance factor was a term I dealt with in the '80s, in the heyday of my career in retail audio. There were certain products then that you knew if the man were going to run it by his wife/girlfriend  you were dead in the water. First and foremost, the Dahlquist DQ-10s. Especially sitting on their optional stands.I always thought they had a classic look, but basically just big square screens.

          What got me thinking about this subject, some of the current highly recommended very expensive speakers covered in the magazines, well I hate to say it- would scare the pants off you if you walked into a room with lights off!

   Vivids on the cover of this month's Stereophile. Honest to God, would you blame your wife for not wanting these? If she did, I would have to seriously re-evaluate her. What are they thinking? No doubt I would nickname these "Casper". Or something from Dr. Seuss..........

  Interesting bit of trivia, one of the designers for the B&W Nautilus is who also designed these.(I have purposely omitted novelty speakers from this entry, there are far too many). These were not designed as novelty speakers, but as a statement product.

 Although not as radical, ugly to me and definitely not something I would spend the $$$ they command are the YG acoustics brand.I'm sure impeccable build quality, wonderful sound, but  aesthetics just leave me cold.

 Now, mind you I'm not saying I haven't owned my share of ugly speakers in the past. Not saying I can't also  be a sucker for marketing and merchandising. 

 I had two or three pairs of DQ-10s. I also had Pioneer TZF- 700s (recently, if you have been following this blog)

    Celestion glass speakers (although I only bought these for the way they looked, I didn't consider them ugly. Some guy in Tennessee had a local relative drive a couple of hours to buy them from me).

                 Other historically love it or hate it speakers have included models from Spica

The Angelus

TC-50

And my vote for the ugliest speaker of all time- The Plasmatonics Hill Type-1.

Of course, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the the beholder. Aesthetics are waaayyy too important to me. Sometimes they go out of their way to be ugly. We certainly remember them, don't we? Surely at some point you owned an ugly speaker.Be it a Bose 901,Dahlquist,Spica, whatever,not just talking about a huge vinyl wrapped ugly doggie coffin but a truly bizarre speaker.