Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately, life is full of compromises, and that’s probably best illustrated by my living room. Ideally, my system wouldn’t be in a corner of the room, but just to the left of the cabinet is a fireplace. The left speaker is just to the left of it. The Yamaha receiver does a pretty good job of compensating for the speaker placement. If you are on my sofa, which is at a 90 degree angle and in front of the fireplace, the left speaker is actually in a better location than if it was next to the cabinet. I must say that I listen to music and watch sports much more often than I watch movies, so it’s not quite as annoying to me. I would prefer that I had the entire wall to use, as a fireplace in south Louisiana isn’t very important to me, but people down here still want them!
I can relate to the dangers of having a pine tree close to a house during a hurricane. Thankfully, I don’t have any Pine trees near my house. Pine can look very nice if you put a nice stain on it. FWIW, I got my original design concept from Studio Tech’s U-22T. You can see that I “borrowed” several of their ideas! Best of luck to everyone building their own versions. I’ll post my design drawings in the next day or so. Oh, I would love to paint the cable box, but I don’t think the cable company would be too happy. I have actually considered covering the front face with less permanent black duct tape, but it would look like crap when the door was open!
