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Poll: Faceplate preference

Silver, Black, or.. What's your faceplate preference?

  • Total voters
    106
Lavane said:
The silver buttons and knobs make it really pop. :thumbsup:
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Yeah, it was a beauty and fully recapped, but the "three martini lunch" sound was not what I was looking for. I broke even when I sold it so all ended up well. I have some old Pioneer tuners (TX-7800 and TX-9800) that I got cheap because the vinyl on the cases is peeling, but I'll probably end up taking a bath when I try to sell those off...
 
I’ve had my gear for long enough now that I pay little attention to the looks. It sits over in the corner, out of the way (and I keep the grills on my speakers). I won’t say that looks don’t matter at all, but I definitely made my gear purchases based on the sound quality above all else.
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I have a slight preference for silver, as most of the classic vintage gear of my childhood that inspired me to collect as an adult was silver. That said, I don't necessarily dislike black, it can be done quite well, as in the Sansui Definition and Professional series components, and even the later AU-n17 lineup. I was pretty down on black components for a while due to the BPC era of the later 80's and 90's having run so long, and producing so much marginal, boring looking gear. That's a large part of what started me down the road of collecting vintage gear in 1996.

Champagne finish can look excellent. I have a stack of Luxman separates (CX/MX-100, TX-101, GX-101, D-03) and while they are from the less desirable Alpine/Luxman era, the finish and overall look is exceptionally well done. And almost nobody else was doing that finish back in the mid 80's, it didn't really get popular until almost the mid 90's when Sansui, Onkyo, Denon and several other makers started doing gear that style.

Some of the exotic finishes, like copper, can look phenomenal when properly executed. I'd like to mention the Kyocera line up of the mid-late 80's which was a sort of pewter/light gunmetal type shade on brushed aluminum. It was singularly unique, quite distinctive, and looked damn good to me then (and now).
 
Lavane said:
NAD equipment never looked good to me. I'm not knocking the sound or build quality, but I just can't get past how NAD'S equipment looks.
Some people like how their equipment looks and that's fine.
It's just too stark and dull looking to me.
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At some point (circa 1978), NAD lost its way (according to 55.3% of AK'ers) :):)

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GChief said:
I just consider the source of those numbers :D
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The data has spoken! The fans of black are like that "1 out of 5" dentist (okay, 2.4 out of 5) who preferred that his patients grind sugar into their teeth.

I mean, sure, it's great for business -- but is it right?? :)
 
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peterp1 said:
The data has spoken! The fans of black are like that "1 out of 5" (okay, 2.4 out of 5) dentist who preferred that his patients grind sugar into their teeth.
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And the silver faced fan boys are just dentist stuck in the 70s. ;)
 
Yeah, the NAD charcoal grey minimalist look (sometimes with odd colored buttons contrasting against that drab grey background) is an aesthetic approach I could never get into. Yes, gear is about the sound, first and foremost, but if we're being honest with ourselves, it needs to be visually appealing. If that weren't important, manufacturers wouldn't have spent so much effort on the visual details. And while tastes certainly vary, the post-late 70's NAD look was never to my liking.

I also dislike the way NAD oversimplified many components. One example is an old NAD CD player I bought cheaply to part out the optical block (as it was a rebadged Toshiba) to repair a old Luxman based on the same Toshiba model. NAD commissioned their version to remove all but the most basic functions (play, pause, stop, skip forward and back, FF and FR) from the front panel, while the Toshiba player it was based on had far greater functionality to begin with (track program ability, different time display modes, etc.). Oddly enough, it had an IR remote, where the original Toshiba unit didn't, and the Luxman I was repairing relied on a system linked remote via a DIN plug on the rear panel.

Now, maybe that was done to meet a price point, but I've noted NAD seems to do that with some frequency. And it wasn't like they were undercutting their competition on price by a wide enough difference that I'd have gone downmarket in features, just to save a few bucks.
 
NAD may have been the first mainstream maker to break the trend of "flashy" gear in the late 70's, kind of foreshadowing the BPC trap nearly all other hifi companies fell into by the mid-late 1980's.

Of course, most of the other big players didn't embrace the same sort of minimalism NAD became known for, but it's interesting to me that NAD was making stuff pretty typical of the prevailing industry standard (like the amp posted by @peterp1) and then rapidly abandoned that for the "boring grey", a look they continued with for a very long time. In perusing their current offerings, I see they have introduced a bit more visual pizzazz into their product line.
 
Bodyblue said:
I despise all black wood equally....I do not discriminate.

I also despise the hideous oak vinyl wrapped furniture/speakers etc of the 80s also.
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I'm not really big on that dark wood stuff either. I'm more of a mid-century modern fan and dig teak and even very light woods. A friend of mine, who I wouldn't say has the most discerning taste, really hates light wood. He's got a pair of these really amazing pure Audio Project open baffle speakers, and because he hated the blond finish that these things came with (I think he may have been able to order it with other options, but didn't think to do so) he has these really gaudy, cartoonish pillowcase looking things (they look like a really loud Hawaii shirt) over them, that he picked up somewhere on vacation (maybe in Costa Rica), which to my mind, cheapen the look of these great speakers and aren't even likely to be acoustically transparent. Though he has 10s of thousands worth of hi-fi gear, he has the electronics set up on these really cheap looking, flimsy wire baking rack type shelves and his furniture mostly looks like it might have been from Goodwill. I don't get the whole idea of spending so much on great audio gear, but then spending so little on furnishing the place where you're using the stuff. Still, I realize that it isn't my thing and I leave it at that.

For hi-fi aesthetics, I really prefer the classic vintage look of sliver-face stuff, and/or wood. My Marantz 2270 has both of those, with it's wood case, Unfortunately, most of my other components are simply black, which doesn't match and doesn't have the same classy vibe to me. My vintage Yamaha pf-800 turntable has a wood base, but it's the black version and not the teak-looking stained version (that would match the 2270). It would be nice if all the stuff matched, but it's not a big enough issue that I would ever swap the stuff out for gear that does. It all sounds good together, at least to my ears, and that's the most important thing to me...
 
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Guth said:
I’ve had my gear for long enough now that I pay little attention to the looks. It sits over in the corner, out of the way (and I keep the grills on my speakers). I won’t say that looks don’t matter at all, but I definitely made my gear purchases based on the sound quality above all else.
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Like those Naim pieces. :beerchug:
 
Gigantic said:
Blackface is a pretty loaded term, no?

I had an NAD 3020 in the late 80's. Perhaps foreshadowing today's compact gear, I kinda low-key felt a hint of shame regarding its form factor- not as big as a "proper" integrated and the dull gray finish that wasn't nearly as blingy as the anodized black alloy panels on anything comparable at the time. Of course, it more than made up for it in SQ and it's one of the few vintage pieces that I sort of covet.
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A NAD was my very first CD player and probably the only thing that I had up to that point that was anything which might have been called "audiophile" It was a good deal and functioned well for a couple of decades and I had no real complaint with it. That gear though it isn't what I would call ugly, has a certain kind of very plain, utilitarian look to it. I'd say that the plain looking aspect to it is maybe part of the beauty of it: that the company spends more on what's inside than the aesthetics. If I were to have wound up with a system of really nice NAD components and it all sounded very good to me, which it probably would, I think I'd be OK with it, even if isn't the prettiest stuff...
 
I voted for silver because with aging eyes it's hard to read the grey-on-black legends on black faceplates.
My true feelings? Can't beat a good DIY project in an aluminum (silver!) Bud box, labeled with Dymo tape or a Magic Marker! It screams authenticity.
 
@avionic, that "titanium" Yamaha is a little reminiscent of the Kyocera line made in the mid-late 1980's, down to the wood cheek blocks. I don't know if Kyocera had a specific name for the shade they used, but it was quite distinctive, and no other maker has come close to replicating it since. I thought it looked quite sharp, as did their entire design "language" at that time. The only downside is that nothing else matched it, so if you wanted a uniform looking setup, you were locked into their product lineup.
 
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