SoundCtrl – Gramophone II: Elegant Acoustic Amplification For The HTC One

By Brian Parker

Piggybacking the HTC slogan and initiative Here’s To Change, the UK branch of the company has been working with product designers in a new program called Here’s To Creativity. The first collaboration between HTC and designer Justin Wolter realized a beautiful and innovative 3D printed speaker called the Gramohorn II, formatted to be a dock for the HTC One.

The Gramohorn II is a passive speaker system, meaning it requires no electrical power to function. Rather, using the resonance chambers of the speakers and the gramophone-inspired horns, the audio emitted from the HTC One’s Boom Sound dual front-facing speakers is amplified by natural acoustics.

The Gramohorn II is a available in a variety of vivid colors, with the choice of having the speakers printed in a plaster or a metal composite. The two versions are available at a whopping £999 ($1600) and £4999 ($8000) for the wealthier HTC owners.

Wolter’s philosophy behind the Gramohorn’s design is based on the increasing accessibility and diminishing sound quality of digital music. Each Gramohorn is hand-made and finished to order, bringing the intrinsic ‘uniqueness’ and ‘originality’ of art into the sphere of digital audio technology. On a technical level, the Gramohorn somewhat ironically addresses audio compression, in that the loudspeakers can only be as good as the sounds it amplifies. So HTC One users, please make sure you’ve downloaded the lossless versions of your songs before docking into the Gramohorn.