apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

That is fucking genius.

would it not be easier to just get a media center with doors then add locks?

Does the sound from your center channel just bounce around in there?

That is brilliant and would work well for people with curious pets, too!!

Lara here. Thanks for the compliments! (I was pretty pleased myself.)

Sara48: It's probably easier to get doors with locks (if you don't need the remote to run whatever's behind the door). We already had this one and liked it, so didn't want to buy another one or add doors to ours.

spinsLPs: Yeah, we probably do lose some sound that way. It's probably easily fixable by putting the speaker on a little platform, but it's not a bad enough problem/high enough priority that we've gotten around to doing this. (We have a 2yo and an infant, hence the need for this.)

One other note: we initially thought that heat might be a problem (even though the back is open), but it's turned out to be fine. N.B., however, we don't have it running 24/7. Easy solution is to drill small holes, which Tap will do for you ($$$) or you can do yourself if you buy the right set of bits (which they sell at Tap).

Nice Rotel gear. ;)

Wow what a great idea!!!

Speaking as an audiophile: Nice Krell too............which tends to have very sharp corners that could hurt little fingers.

Brilliant idea, but yeah I do wonder about the sound ricocheting around the inside there from the center channel.

In this case, the beauty of plexiglass is that you can see though it & admire the eye candy of high end separates which this most certainly is.

I don't have kids or pets, so I don't need to do this .....yet.
I'm making a mental book marker however;)

I would rather put the kid in a plastic box.

maybe i'm missing something, but how would this work with a dvd player (which seems to be an important part of a media center)? don't you need to be able to put your dvds in?

Clemoni - there is a slot for the DVD player tray to slide out (top right; you can't really see it, but it is just big enough to let the tray through). We were prepared to close it off if it became too much of a problem, but she hasn't done much with it; a more destructive kid would've probably broken the tray by now. The other option we considered was putting the DVD player on a lazy susan (swing it to the back to put the DVD in, swing it to the front to use the remote and watch the movie, swing it back to remove the DVD), but we don't watch all that many DVDs so figured we'd go with the cutout and see how it worked.