Been furniture shopping lately?
By Matt Burns 
posted Feb 17th 2006 11:50AM
posted Feb 17th 2006 11:50AM
Plasmas are everywhere: restaurants, schools, diners, and furniture stores. Not real ones but rather those plastic look-alikes.
I recently went shopping for some furniture for the theater I'm putting in my house (more on that to come later) and noticed that they were all over the place. This wasn't just at low end stores, but even Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel style stores. Is this important? Heck yeah it is. A lot of people don't care what TV they have but rather how it looks. If the furniture was designed to hold a flat screen, those people will buy a flat screen. And you know what? I didn't see one fake tube TV in any of the stores.
I'm in the same boat. I'm moving soon and trying to find furniture, finding a nice entertainment cabinet is a total pain. Especially if you are on a budget.
Been trying to track down the cabinet/credenza seen here:
http://onkyo.com/images/topleft.jpg
Ethan Allen has mechanical units that completely hide a plasma inside them:
http://www.ethanallen.com/ea/com.ethanallen.ecom.FrameDirectorServlet?&body=95
I bought all six pieces of the Logan Media Suite from the Pottery Barn outlet near me over a 5 month period. It was a long process, but I saved about $1500 doing it that way over buying it in the catalog. It nicely frames by 55 inch Sony TV.
Check out a line of furniture from a maker named "Hooker". Top quality stuff (hard wood) and A/V friendly (speaker grille door inserts, cooling vents).
I usually go here for ideas:
dwr.com
Then I goto IKEA to look for similar items at far less prices.
You can certainly try these sites: http://www.eurway.com/storage.lasso?all=13&categorykey=96&subcategorykey=24&-session=eo_user:D0112019054ca228CAVjN3356A9C and here: http://www.modernoonline.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=21&sort=20a&page=1.
For people with alot of extra disposable cash ;-) you can go here http://www.sharutfurniture.com/walls/home.htm and for plasmas http://www.furnitureinmotion.com/.
My wife and I were pretty miffed last year when we went furniture shopping for an entertainment center. We had decided on a 46-inch DLP HDTV. We wanted to buy an armoire-style entertainment center. We traveled to 4 or 5 furniture stores and found that they all made armoires that fit 35/36-inch CRT sets.
I can't believe how slow the furniture industry has been to adopt the footprint of HDTVs.
We ending up finding a nice set-up that consists of a short center console that is about 48-inches wide (the TV measures 42 IIRC), matching bookcase sides, and a "light bridge" across the top. It's like having an armoire that's always open.