"If you put these in an English country home, you're going to have to like music a lot more than you like furniture," confesses David Day, the man who recently took over U.S. distribution for Avantgarde Acoustic. Take one look at Avantgarde's speakers and you know immediately what he's talking about. They're some of the most radical designs on the market today, resembling what might happen if a marching band took a wrong turn through an auto paint shop. And in an age when visually subtle in-wall, on-wall, and in-ceiling speakers have stolen countless sales away from traditional freestanding models, they're a bold statement from both technical and aesthetic perspectives.

"Our client wants something different," Day continues, in a statement that on a moment's reflection seems as obvious as a Ferrari dealer saying, "Our client wants something sporty." Day and Avantgarde's German managers are not concerned that their product might alienate aficionados of traditional design. They are content to find customers in New York, Los Angeles, and other locales where modern interior design is common. Indeed, for this article, I interview Day at Los Angeles' Pacific Design Center, where his products are featured in the Menzie International showroom along with a collection of designer furnishings. "If someone's walking into this showroom, they're a good client for us from an aesthetics standpoint," he explains. No one can deny that Avantgarde's speakers would attract attention even in, say, Cher's living room, but that's the point—and there are many for whom such a flamboyant addition to their home is most welcome.

Still, one has to wonder why the company chose such a visually arresting—perhaps even visually aggressive—design. "When people ask why the speakers look the way they do," Day relates with a grin, "the German engineers always reply, 'Because they have to.'"

Even someone who knows not the first thing about audio transducers can readily identify what makes Avantgarde's speakers different: They use horns instead of cone- and dome-shaped drivers mounted on the front of a wooden box. The most important advantage of a horn speaker is that it is far more efficient than conventional speakers. When fed a 1-watt audio signal, an ordinary box speaker might produce 89 decibels of sound at a distance of 1 meter. But Avantgarde's horn speakers typically deliver 104 dB from the same signal—a level that the conventional speaker would need 32 watts of power to achieve. The rise in efficiency occurs because the horn helps the moving diaphragm inside couple to the air around it. Day makes an apt comparison: "It's like the difference between pushing your hand through the air, then holding onto a big piece of cardboard and pushing your hand through the air."

Practically everyone knows that 100-watt amplifiers are plentiful and (often) cheap, so why does anyone need a speaker with 104 dB sensitivity? According to Day, there are two reasons. "You get distortion if the voice coils [the wire-wound cylinders that form the moving part of a speaker's "motor"] move back and forth excessively. With a horn on the front, the voice coil moves less."

Day also notes that high-sensitivity speakers allow the use of better-sounding, low-powered amplifiers—a contention with which most audiophiles would agree. "Unless you use a Class A amplifier, it's possible to hear the transistors switching on and off," he states. "But Class A designs tend to produce very low power. With horns, you can use Class A transistor amps or single-ended tube amps [another typically low-powered design] and get the benefits of those without having to worry about the amp running out of power."

Horns enjoy yet another advantage, too: They produce more consistent sound (albeit over a limited area) than most conventional speakers. Day says, "With a properly designed horn, the sound's going to be absolutely consistent over a 60-degree angle"—or 30 degrees to the left or right of the speaker. With conventional speakers, sound dispersion characteristics differ with frequency and among the various drivers, so the sound quality varies more depending on where the listener is sitting.

To sound out Day's technical claims, I visit his Huntington Beach showroom, a converted garage fitted with an extensive collection of audio components and an incredibly massive folding door of a design normally reserved for use on aircraft hangers. ("At the Design Center, if we play the system at full capacity, we'll get a lot of complaints," he points out.) The Huntington Beach facility allows clients to listen to CDs, watch high-definition movies, and even plug in a guitar if they wish.

On display is a $131,000 system including the Trio, Avantgarde's top-of-the-line speaker, and the BassHorn, the only horn-loaded subwoofer I have ever seen. While the Trio attracts attention, the BassHorn commands it. It's a modular subwoofer: Each module measures about 30 inches high, 42 inches wide, and 40 inches deep, and the Huntington Beach showroom uses six of them, in two stacks of three modules each. It's no less imposing than having a VW van parked in your living room, although it is vastly more attractive. If the curator of New York's Museum of Modern Art parked a few of these in the lobby, I doubt any art lover would look askance. (And they might command an even higher price.)

The BassHorn is made from aluminum-covered plywood with veneered top and bottom panels; you can have the aluminum parts finished in metallic colors to match the main speakers. Each horn contains two 12-inch woofers, which would produce substantial bass power even in a conventional box cabinet. In a horn-loaded cabinet, though, the output is enormous. And in this case, it's enormous times six.

Although the system seems primed to blast you out of your seat, it starts by courting me gently. We begin with 10 Best: Home Entertainment Editors Pick the Best of Chesky Records, a collection of tracks packed with the depth and detail that comes from Chesky's purist recording techniques. It seems incongruous for an assemblage of a dozen horns to emit such a soft, smooth, airy sound, but that's what I hear. And there's no obvious coloration in the sound; the treble, midrange, and bass all sound smooth and equally balanced. What really excites me, though, is that as I move around in my chair—or into a different chair—the sound does not change significantly. The horns really do perform as advertised.

Usually when I play my "torture test" bass tracks, I can push practically any subwoofer to its limits, but nothing I can feed the BassHorn even slightly fazes it. The six subs seem almost to grab hold of the air in the room; it's like my body is directly coupled to the drivers. Yet the bass sounds surprisingly even from note to note, probably because the radiating area of the six horns is so large that it's more like being inside a subwoofer than in front of it.

The Avantgarde system is as incredible for the ears as it is stimulating to the eyes. Day doesn't seem to care which excites his customers more—"Some may like it for the audio performance, some may like it as an art object," he says—but lucky are those who, like me, can savor both aspects of this extraordinary system.