We live in a neighborhhod with Victorian style homes including ours and the Grammophone like look appealed to her. We think alike in this way in that I think that is part of the appeal of horns to me, is that tie to the past.While the ancestral heritage of modern horns is most commonly associated with the gramophone and phonograph, for which the horn provided acoustical amplification without electrical signals being involved, it should be kept in mind that horns were also the leading speaker technology in the earliest days of commercial radio broadcasting. Those being the years between roughly 1920 and 1925.
Rather than providing mechanical/acoustical amplification of the vibrations of a stylus and an associated diaphragm, in radio applications a headphone-like transducer was used to convert electrical signals to sound, which in turn was amplified by the horn.
A nice collection of these things is shown here. My collection of antique radios includes a mahogany version of the Amplion Dragon (another example of which is shown at the upper right of that page), which to collectors is one of the more desirable models. I haven't yet tried it in my main audio system, though :-)
Best regards,
-- Al