I thought I'd share an av-3 build that is a little different in finish than most you see. There are a few more pictueres in my gallery. A full explanation of the system follows.
My wife and I recently finished up on a large job that included a complete re-model and new finishes in a large custom house. The clients are some friends of ours we've known for more than 10 years and this is the third house we've worked on for them. At the end of the job I talked the client, a very jovial Irish man who loves 60's vintage rock and roll, into having me help him built his home theater setup instead of paying an arm and a leg for a sub-par setup at a big box store. I didn't exactly charge him for any of this stuff, just had him re-imburse me for materials. He had been very good to us on the main portion of the job and I really wanted to do this just for kicks. I was able to practice some new tecnniques and dramatically improve my woodworking ability on this job.
The homeownwers had purchased a very large coffee table with a hand scraped finish, and the dining table was a distressed mahogany finish with some sort of oak inlay pattern on the top. The speakers and console unit were designed and finished to coordinate and complement with the rest of the furniture in the house. You can see a bit of the coffee table in some of the photos.
The speakers, the console unit, and the armoir unit on the right were all built by myself and my wife and I did the finish on them. The cases and tops are either solid poplar or cherry veneer with a dye, stain, glaze finish. The fronts and doors are all white oak with a dye, seal, stain, and drybrush step. The stain was left in the pores to really highlight the open grain. All of the wood was distressed and some hand-scraped before finishing.
The armoir unit houses a downward firing sub-woofer in the base portion and the upper portion houses pull out shelves for CD's and DVD's.
The center two sections of the console house an a/v receiver, blue ray player, digital satellite DVR, and and an old school VHS VCR. There are vent slots in the bottom of the unit as well as the shelves, and the back of the case is fitted with heat actuated fans. There is also an IR repeater, so the whole unit can be operated with the doors left closed.
The center channel speaker sitting on top is an av-123 x series speaker. Re-figuring that will be the next project. I'm thinking about building an in-wall speaker using GR Research drivers to locate below the TV. I don't want to have a speaker sitting on the console. The wall is framed 5 1/2" deep and there is a nice stud space centered right on the TV so I think I could get a sealed box of decent volume in the wall space, especially if I built it so the baffle protruded 1" or 2" off the wall.
The speakers are run of the mill AV-3's built with the port at the front to accomodate close wall placement. Aesthetics and placement were #1 in this system, sound was secondary. Still, it sounds a whole lot better than the small KEF 5.1 system he did have in here. This room is huge, comprised of the the living room, kitchen, dining room, and foyer in one space with ceilings as high as 16', and the small satellites sounded very thin and tinny. The homeowners are very pleased with this new setup. It's been up a going for a few months now. We had dinner with them last night and followed up by listening to a couple of Colm Wilkinson cd's they had.
Anyways, thought it would be nice to share something a little different finish wise.
