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(More customer reviews)Being that the flat-panel television market has exploded over the past decade, and increasingly so over the past several years, there is clearly an increasing demand for well-made, well-designed products able to hold TV's, receivers and home theater components. What's even more important is for these products to look nice, compete with pricey offerings from Pottery Barn, West Elm and Restoration Hardware, all while hiding cables and other tell-tale signs that the equipment producing great sound and imagery are tucked away, far out of sight and out of mind.
Bell'o is a company that has been designing solid rack-based stereo furniture for awhile; I've seen their products mentioned alongside Salamander and other respected brands.
So when I purchased a 46" Samsung and I needed a place to hide my Denon monster-sized receiver, a cable box, a DVD player, a Blu-Ray player, an X-Box, a power conditioner and a few other odds and ends, I began searching for something not only that could accommodate all this equipment (not only weight but size/dimensions), but would and could do so while looking good and not offend my family's stylistic sensibilities.
I found that anything I came across that could handle these components and their requisite cables, etc., was over $2,000. I simply couldn't afford to buy the television and a cabinet that expensive.
Enter Bell'o.
The company markets several large cabinets, including this item, the PR-12. Their cabinets are smartly designed -- the shelves are adjustable (height-wise), the rear of the cabinets can be removed temporarily (for access to rear panels for wiring and replacement) or permanently (for heat dissipation). So far, so good.
The back of the cabinet panels are designed in such a way that you can have the cables run from one end to the other of the cabinet without them being out and about (in other words, unseen). This is "cable management." It sort of works -- you can have bulky HDMI and speaker cables run along these channels so they're not visible.
And finally, the shelves and part of the front and bottoms of the cabinet have holes/vents in them both for cable routing and for airflow. Very nice, thoughtful design.
Too bad all of this smart, creative design is wasted on poor, awful, miserably bad construction and materials.
This cabinet -- which cost three times what something similar from Ikea would cost -- is made from particle board and what feels like paper. The first shipped cabinet I received from Amazon was in such awful shape that when I attempted to remove it from my apartment it fell apart and had to be removed in an industrial-size wheeled garbage bin. I should have learned my lesson then, but I didn't.
I ordered another to replace the refunded purchase price for this pile of glue and posterboard.
And unfortunately, another one survived and reached me unscathed. Meaning, I opted to keep it.
Big mistake.
The mid-cabinet feet, which are adjustable, somehow managed to come loose and the underside sockets in the cabinet where they were screwed in were somehow ripped out. Meaning, two big areas of damage underneath the cabinet. Meaning, the cabinet won't properly support its own weight and, eventually, the whole thing will crack in half like a match stick -- which, incidentally, is about as strong and load-bearing as this cabinet.
Of course, one would think -- spending $800 or so for a cabinet -- that the manufacturer would stand behind its product.
They sure do -- they're about as trustworthy as Bernie Madoff.
So after spending $800+ on an Ikea-quality cabinet, I had to spend another $150 to get a local carpenter to build something for below the cabinet to insure it wouldn't collapse into and onto itself.
And every time I move it to access the rear panel to tweak wiring or to make sure everything is set up properly, I cringe.
And every time I consider moving, I wonder if this piece of garbage will survive the move. Actually, that's not true -- I don't wonder -- I know it won't.
Save yourself the trouble and the money and either a) buy something half the price of this garbage so you don't feel swindled and regret the purchase hours after it arrives, or b) spend enough money to get something made of actual wood and not posterboard, paper and glue. It's certainly painful having to spend as much if not moreso on the cabinet housing a pricey new TV, but consider that putting your faith in a piece of garbage like this to house your expensive equipment -- and that shiny new TV -- will leave you wondering whether it will, while you go out to earn a salary, collapse onto itself and send all that expensive gear crashing onto the floor while you're out.
I wish I had the benefit of a real review of this cabinet and this company before I agreed to purchase something from them; assuming you are still willing to purchase something from them -- this or anything else featuring "wood" (eg wood-veneer-covered paper) -- when you wind up having to toss the disintegrated remains of their product(s) from your house/apartment, keep repeating the phrase "caveat emptor" and find something made with real wood that doesn't squander great design with chicanery and disingenuous build "quality."
And remind yourself that you not only get what you pay for, sometimes you pay far more than what you get.
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