After spending a lot of time perusing the internet in search of a new piece of furniture to house the A/V system, I finally settled on the Munari M1 system from Diamond Case. This Italian-made ready to assemble furniture is made from some sort of MDF and is covered in a black melamine veneer. The mouldings are piano black wood.
It consists of three modules that you can bolt together to make the lowboy. There are 2 M60 units and an M65. The M60's have have two shelves while the wider M65 accomodates a center speaker and features a media storage drawer.
Assembly was straightforward. I was shorted one shelf pin in the packages but, otherwise, all the pieces were there. The assembly hardware is all good quality and strong so the units themselves are very rigid and strong when completed. The M65 comes with both a grill cloth and glass doors so there is a lot of flexibility in how you use it. The unit was about $1400 delivered from California to Indiana. For details you can go
http://www.diamondcase.com. I haven't yet decided to use the doors. I may just leave it the way it is.
My unit is pictured below without the smoke glass doors. I haven't yet decided whether or not I want to install them. Operating the system without the doors will certainly be less hassle. We'll see. I put the receiver and DirecTV receiver on the left, my 3 disc players on the right and the center section has a center channel speaker behind the grill cloth. The media storage drawer is below. You can even see the Squeezebox display beside the TV set. Altogether a nice unit that is easy to incorporate in almost any kind of decor.
