Artists craft the ultimate iPhone fanboi holiday gift

Apparently inspired by the alpenhorn and shofar, an Italian design firm has created the ultimate in glitzy, ritzy sound support for the iPhone: the Megaphone.

Just in time for holiday shopping, en&is, founded by Enrico Bosa and Isabella Lovero of Milan, has married the simplicity of passive audio amplification with the shiny-shiny conspicuous consumptiveness of the most stylistian fanboi.

A marriage of cutting-edge technology, old-world craftsmanship, and crass materialism

This ceramic oggetto d'arte isn't for members of the great unwashed – the 99 per cent, as it were. Should you choose to grace your molto moderna living space with a Megaphone, it'll run you €399 ($535) for a black or white amplificatore passivo, or €599 ($800) for one in in gold – which, by the way, is "applied with a brush by highly trained and skilled decorators," then fired at 720°C (1,328°F), fully justifying its premium price.

The Megaphone is isolated from the surface upon which it is placed by a wooden frame, and is operated by simply placing your iPhone – or iPod touch, in a case – into its open-ended aperture.

To our ears – at least when listening to it perform in an en&is video – the Megaphone is not for the audiophile, though it does produce a somewhat retro, gramaphonesque sound spectrum:

However, as with a well-behaved child, this handcrafted ostentation is meant to be seen, and not heard. ®

A tip of the hat to the ever-entertaining Geeks are Sexy for bringing the Megaphone to our attention