u/bimmer1over

About 2 1/2 months ago I posted here about me wanting to build a custom cabinet for my hi-fi gear, for a couple of reasons:

My old cabinet was dated and was falling apart due to the heavy load of the equipment, and it was also an inefficient use of space as I needed more bays for all the different separates in the audio chain.

I also always struggled with access to the back of the equipment to e.g., change interconnects, so another design goal was to have easy access to the back of the equipment.

I therefore designed my cabinet with a 6 inch deep cable chase so interconnects between the units are staying inside the cabinet in the designated cable chase.

Well, the project has of course progressed since then and I'm sharing some photos of the different stages. I had to build custom tools and jigs to help rout dados into the base for the vertical side panels and vertical panels for the shelves, making sure everything had a nice fit for all the solid walnut pieces.

One thing with building cabinets is that precision is key. If you're off by the dimensioning of the various pieces, or routing the dados is off, or things are not aligned exactly 90°, the errors compound and suddenly you find yourself where the pieces may not fit together well.

The walnut pieces were originally raw slabs that were milled to my specified thickness. I then glued them together to get to the panel sizes I needed for the base, the vertical panels, and the shelves.

I have reached the stage now where I have glued together the carcass and I'm about to stain it to its final finish.

The next step is to start working on the top, which will be a live edge river slab, about 2 inches thick and floating, so I can easily remove the top and have easy access to all the equipment and cabling in the cabinet from the top and back.

After some online sleuthing and being opportunistic about trying (/adding) something new to the system, a pair of Rockport Aviors are finally here and installed after a cross-country journey from CA.

For now, they’re taking the place of my KEF Blade One Metas, which have at least for now taken a step aside, literally and figuratively.

The Aviors have been fully integrated into the system using a Trinnov ST2-Pro running Optimizer, and we're off to a good start.

The Aviors bring an effortless sense of scale and authority, but what has impressed me most so far is how naturally they disappear into the room. Imaging is precise without sounding etched, and bass integration has been excellent.

The rest of the system is built around both digital and analog sources.

Digital playback comes from an Antipodes K41/K22 server/rendeder front-end feeding a Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC, while vinyl is handled by a Rega Naia/Aphelion 2 through an Allnic H-3000V phono stage.

From the Tambaqui on through an Audio Research Reference 10 linestage into Pass Labs XA100.8 monoblocks, with dual JL Audio Fathom f112 subwoofers handling the lowest bass, with the ST-2's crossover is set at 60 Hz.

It’s still very early, but first impressions are extremely positive. Looking forward to spending more time with them and seeing how they compare to the Blades over the coming weeks. 🕺

As I briefly posted about a couple of weeks ago, I have embarked on a cabinet-building project, and this woodworking project is unlike anything I’ve done before.

My previous table furniture projects focused on slab preparation, epoxy work, shaping, sanding, and finishing.

This cabinet requires an entirely new set of skills: joinery, panel glue-ups, precision fitting, and maintaining tight tolerances across dozens of parts.

The goal is a custom walnut equipment cabinet for my Listening Lounge, designed specifically around the audio system it will house.

The existing cabinet in the listening lounge is not only falling apart because of the load of the heavy hi-fi gear, but it's also not optimal in terms of the number of bays I need for the different units.

So the goal is to design and build a cabinet that uses space more efficiently while - hopefully - looking beautiful as well.

To that end, I am going from 2 by 2 bays in the existing cabinet to 3 by 2 bays, without making the overall cabinet that much wider as the bays are optimized for my particular equipment, with the bays being 21" wide (to accommodate 19" wide gear) and 10 1/2" tall.

The cabinet will also have a 6" wide cable chase fully inside the cabinet, running the full width of the cabinet, for power cables and interconnects and to make it easy to access the back of the gear as the cabinet top will be fully removable.

The project is going to be a fun challenge, as many of the construction techniques will be firsts for me, which is what makes this project both exciting and intimidating.

Hopefully I will be able to transform a stack of walnut boards into a piece of furniture worthy of the system it’s being built for. We'll see. 😜

(Pardon the irrelevant flair. Unfortunately there are no flairs available for DIY projects such as room treatments and cabinets.)

Some of you may remember my DIY diffuser project I posted about, some months ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/diysound/s/Eyo5JRgpXK).

Well, under that front wall diffuser, placed between my speakers and the bass traps is a yay old cabinet.

It has bravely served its purpose but is finally giving up, given that I've loaded it with quite a lot of gear and the shelves are not strong enough for all the bits and pieces.

Also I can't fit all the equipment in the cabinet, so my Trinnov DSP has to sit outside and temporarily placed on top of one of my Pass Labs monoblocks. Needless to say, it's not great.

And, finally, the cabinet is not quite deep enough so I can't close the doors on one side of the cabinet because of the depth of those units and the associated power cables and connections in the back that easily add 3-4" of needed depth.

So, to make a long story short, I am embarking on another woodworking project - to build myself a new cabinet.

Recently I learned how to make tables and wall art using walnut slabs from scratch through final product, so this will be an interesting progression as building a cabinet involves for me glueups and joinery.

The first photo shows what it looks like today and the second image a rendition of the cabinet to-be, which will feature six bays instead of four, being more optimized for the gear I have.

I'll try to post some updates here, now and then, to show my progression, trials and, hopefully, tribulations... 😊

Some of you may remember my DIY diffuser project I posted about, some months ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/diysound/s/Eyo5JRgpXK).

The Listening Lounge has evolved quite a bit since then. I first added two 6" bass absorbers and three diffusers (all from GIK) on the back wall.

To further help reduce first reflections hitting me from the back wall, I also pulled the sofa forward about two feet, which helped a lot.

I then realized that it created a rather big gap between the sofa and the room treatments, so I figured why not fill up the gap with a sofa table?

So, I learned how to make walnut/epoxy river tables from raw slabs and built me two - one 7' sofa table and an end-table, both in the same style with a blue "river" that also incorporates LEDs.

Very happy with those, and learned a lot from those projects. (Wife was slightly less excited about surrendering one of our garage bays-turned-wood-workshop, but sometimes the end justifies the means and now she's happy. 😁)

I then went ahead and built a coffee table (also walnut+epoxy, but not with "river") This sounded like a great idea until Wife pointed out that "we already have all the coffee tables we need." OK, so what now?

After some thinking I decided to turn it into a back-lit piece of wall art, and that's where we are at now.

All in all, three very fun projects where I learned a whole lot more about woodworking and not least epoxy, beyond what I already learned from the diffuser project.

🕺