Healy6er, I'm afraid spousal acceptance can often be a problem with Maggies. Three thoughts there: (1) If the 1.6es (1.6s? 1.6's?) in Houston had black covers, your wife may have thought them intimidating; they look more domestic, almost like room divider panels, in off-white. Flanking our display cabinets my wife finds them quite acceptable - so long as I don't advance them into the room! (2) There are home theater Maggies which have no footprint at all because they're mounted on walls or the front corners of tall cabinets of the kind that usually have glass doors and are used to display glass or maybe audio components. However the best of them roll off around 80 Hz so a subwoofer is a necessity, which might bring up acceptance problems again. (3) If only the covers could be replaced with stretched silk with Chinese landscape prints - magnificent. But I don't know anyone who's doing that. Show her page 101 in the current Absolute Sound - a new "invisible" system which isn't on their web site yet.
Re the "newer rating system" - would that it were! Amplifier tests in the defunct "High Fidelity" magazine used it. Conversion is easy if you have a calculator (or, I'll bet you remember slide rules!) that does logarithms. The figure for decibels above one watt (dbw) is simply ten times the common log of the output power figure in watts. So a 5-watt amplifier would be (10 x .699 =) 6.99, or (round off to) 7 decibels above one watt or dbw. But a 50-watt amp would be (10 x 1.7 to keep it simple =) 17 dbw and a 500-watter would be (10 x 2.7 =) 27 dbw. Since we hear volume changes logarithmically the dbw system keeps the comparisons between amplifiers pretty much like how we hear them. Of course advertising departments would probably resist converting to dbw's: "dollars per watt" language would become nonsense and "dollars per dbw" would be pretty hard on both high-power SS gear and high-end tube gear.
Maybe I shouldn't say it here but if you like tube gear, have you thought about the supersensitive, very-high-end, almost full-range speakers like Lowthers? They have no crossovers, are hard to match with subwoofers, and really don't need more than 10 dbw (which conveniently equals 10 watts) - but the detail and "thereness" is incredible. More for stereo music listening than HT, though. Just a thought.
Cheers,
Paul