"We ripped out all the walls of our living room, dining room and kitchen and then added a new kitchen. We ended up with a living/dining area 33 feet long and almost 19 feet wide. We needed a cabinet to house all the AV system including the front speakers that was not tall so that the space still felt large. So we dug a channel through the concrete floor and installed a tube from the attic to an island cabinet. The tube carries power, rear speaker wires, speaker wires for the library and a component A/V cable to a projector for projection to a 7' wide pull down screen that is recessed in the ceiling above the cabinet.
The cabinet was designed to use Ikea kitchen cabinets. They are actually the same cabinets used in our new kitchen with different hardware. It consists of four 24" sink bases with the sink frame cut off the tops. This brought them down to 24" high. There is one 12" cabinet that was also cut down to 24" high which created space for a center speaker. The layout is two 24" cabinets at each end with the 12" cabinet in the center. Since wiring A/V systems is a hassle, to say the least, we decided to have the back of the cabinet facing the dining area all doors that accessed all the equipment.
Ikea was smart enough to make the shelf support holes in the back of the cabinet the same distance from the outside edge as the front holes so the backs could be eliminated and replaced by doors. However, this created a horizontal stability problem so panels were installed in the middle of right speaker cabinet, the 12" center cabinet. A shorter internal panel was installed in the left speaker cabinet to permit the woofer to pass under it.
Doors for the cabinets that have loudspeakers were purchased from the cheapest line that has framed panels. The inner panel was cut out leaving only a hinged frame over which speaker cloth was stretched. Only one cabinet on the dining room side need speaker cloth to permit maximum sound out put form the woofer whose cabinet has speaker cloth both sides.
The ends and top of the cabinet were constructed from 88" high cabinet end panels. We lucked out as there was shipment damage on quite a few of them and got them from the defective goods section.
The cabinets with doors back and front created a problem in that they are about 25" deep. The tall end panels are 24" and we wanted a little overhang both sides. The system is built with Nexus yellow brown doors. To make an "extension patch" seem like a design element we cut the yellow brown top down the middle and installed a 2 1/2" "stripe/extension using Nexus black-brown which gave us the overhangs on both side we wanted. The top could have been made with one 88" high cabinet end cover panel and one 36" high end cover panel but due to the damaged panels the top had to fabricated in three parts. All joins were made with biscuit joiners. This was my first use of biscuit joiners which are great but I'm yet to master perfect joins."
