Minimalist apartment "home theater lite"

I finally upgraded my living room entertainment system. I live in a 1150-square-foot Manhattan apartment so I don't have a basement or a third bedroom that can be used as a dedicated home theater. Thus, the compromise was to use this wall in the living room, and forgo a sub and surrounds. I don't want to mess with hiding the wires to the surrounds or hanging them, and a sub would not be kind to my neighbors.

The main obstacle before was the depth of the cabinet below the TV. The wall unit is from BO Concept and the cabinets are only 13.5" deep inside. Finally Yamaha released the RX-V473 which is quite shallow and has HDMI pass-through (allowing guests just to watch TV without learning the procedures for the AVR). That's what I needed to start this project (it was formerly a 2-channel system, with the TV sitting on the cabinet).

The TV is on a tilting mount--the Sanus VLT15--which I highly recommend. It's anchored to the wood panels (composite actually, but very dense and sturdy) with four "strap togglers" which are miraculous little fasteners.

http://www.toggler.com/products/snaptoggle/installation.php

The picture quality on the LG is nothing to write home about. Frankly, it's worse than the two-year-old 46" Samsung LCD that it replaced. But man does the LG look slick! There is only about 1 cm of black bezel around the image.

For a 3.0-channel system, the sound is great. Just the addition of the center channel justified the whole project.

The TV, AVR and Blu-ray are connected via ethernet to the Linksys (which is in access point mode--the main networking components are in the next room).

Here are some pics:



Edited by JBWIII - 8/31/12 at 10:54am

They're from BO Concept, the Volani series. Website seems to be defunct in that area now--maybe they're discontinued.

http://www.boconcept.us/wall-systems.aspx?ID=83716

While the panels look great, are very strong (they'd hold a TV twice as heavy as this one) and can be removed and re-hung to work on the wiring, I wouldn't recommend the cabinets because they're too shallow for most AVRs.

Yes, this one:

http://www.crutchfield.com/p_051ELM501/Sanus-ELM501-IR-Repeater-System.html?search=sanus_remote&skipvs=T

I've had no problems with it. I would recommend trying different angles for the receiver to get the best reception. My only gripe is that while the IR blasters can be detached (and extended), the IR receiver cannot. Thus you cannot move the receiver too far away from the unit.

Also, the actual receiver is much smaller than the large red circle in the photo--that's just a removable housing.