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I missed this question earlier. I think it's a good'un.
I'm buying stuff for the sound. At least, I'd like to think so.
My decades-old amplifiers have soundly trounced all my dedicated headphone amps. There is room along the margins for quibbling: Sound can be analyzed and quantified objectively, but "good" is purely in the ears of the beholder. Certainly my Violectric amp is not shambolic at all. It's also some wee fraction of the size of any of my receivers, and it delivers all the power any of my headphones need (aside from the very needy HE-6). It also costs some multiple of the market price for all but the really monstrous integrateds and receivers - you could buy a couple AU-717s on Ebay for the price of a single HPA-100. That's kind of unfair, of course; The HPA-100 is currently in manufacture and its price is set at what Violectric can (presumably) reasonably charge, while our elderly receivers and integrateds are all heavily devalued from their original retail prices; much of the kit we're discussing here cost a thousand or more dollars when new, adjusted for 2011 currency, so as much as we moan about inflation in the current price of primo Pioneer receivers, we're really complaining about the SX-1280 being driven up from 1/10 of its original price to, oh, 1/4 or so.
For me, the HE-6 throws the equation cockeyed, though. If I had some other flagship phone, like the LCD-2, HD800, T1, I probably would have stopped with the Violectric and been happy.
The HE-6 is rarely happy with any headphone jack, to the extent that headphone amp designers have been rushing back to the drawing board (circuit design applications, anyway) to come up with anything compatible. On the other hand, we've already got all these receivers lying around in basements, garages, storage closets, and so on... as a happy side effect, we're discovering that they keep up pretty well with modern equipment on other tasks in addition to powering headphones.
Back to the question of looks or sound. I think my Heathkit AR-1500 looks kind of comical - see earlier notes on that. If it wasn't for my memories of the thing as a child, I'd give it a pass, because stylistically it doesn't evoke any genre of high-end gear. Possibly some obscure McIntosh tuner, if unplugged and viewed in really, really dim light. But I also think it sounds great. On the other side, the HK receiver is almost too big, a massive aluminum and glass monster charged with electricity. When I'm working at home it's perched on a filing cabinet inches from my left shoulder and somewhat intimidating. Its scale would be more attractive if it was planted safely somewhere across the room.
