Choosing home theatre furniture

You have to have somewhere to put all that gear!

We love our electronics as much as the next person, and would far prefer to spend our time choosing loudspeakers than looking at furniture. But you do need the furniture, and your choice can affect how well your equipment works.
In fact, there are nearly as many considerations in this as there are in deciding upon your preferred equipment for a home entertainment system.

Before we go into too many of them, though, we wish to stress the one overriding requirement – one that we believe should not be subject to negotiation. That is, your furniture must provide stability.

Every so often you see in the inner pages of a newspaper the story of some toddler seriously hurt by a falling TV. The same can happen with heavy tower loudspeakers. For those loudspeakers, make sure that you install the wide base with which they are normally supplied to reduce the likelihood of it falling. For plasma and LCD TVs, use sturdy furniture that does not wobble on your floor, and if the TV’s own stand doesn’t seem stable enough, strap down the TV to the cabinet using the mounting points on the TV’s rear.

A stable cabinet will also improve your system’s performance since your DVD player will not skip if it is on a solid foundation.

Synergy shelf system

End shelves provide extra space for storing DVDs and other software

GadgetGuy tip

Don’t forget to consider your media storage needs when choosing your furniture. You will already have CDs and DVDs that you want to store, and if you don’t already, you will soon have some Blu-ray discs as well. Each has a distinctively sized case. Blu-ray cases are 170 mm tall, 134 mm deep and, usually, 15 mm thick. If the storage spaces are deep enough and about 20 mm taller than the height of the case, then space usage will be optimised while still allowing good access.