If yera phile ona buggered budget, keep reading. We're going to Ikea today. If there's no outlet near you, let your fingers do the walking. Visit their website at the bottom of this page.

Amp stands and cable lifters made from cross-sawn Butcher block and real hardwood respectively are there for the taking. The kitchen department has a wide variety of chopping boards and in the DIY shelving department, those book ends make perfect cable towers. To convert chopping boards into hifi platforms only requires selecting some hardware that'll act as footers. I've used various Ikea drawer pulls, buttons and door handles.

There's a wooden cutting board with rounded corners just perfectly sized for standard-width components. Another really thick one with lateral side grooves can support even my outsized Yamamoto A-09S. An even bigger one with an anti-slip ledge and drain ridge handles something as monstrous as Emillé's 300B integrated. Needless to say, anything with contours gets belly-flopped so the flat surface is on top. Drill some guide, bolt and counter holes and mount footers.

Cross-sawn (rather than longitudinally staved) Butcher block is a very good vibration killer. And any wood, should you make scratches from heavy equipment rolling, is easily sanded and oiled over to always look nice. Unless your support surfaces are truly level, use three rather than four footers. The insert shows a metal drawer pull with a nipple. Even if your mounting hole isn't perfectly perpendicular because you lack a drill press, you won't have contact chatter since the small nipple will make contact only in a very small spot.

Here is a very heavy Esoteric UX-1 supported on that rounded-corner platform with aluminum drawer pulls mounted as footers. That's a great solution for angling the shelf across a narrower stand if the usual sideway orientation puts a remote eye out of sight. Parts of this platform now can hang over without incurring any instability whatsoever.

Here is the lipped mondo board. For that I picked four flat drawer/door knobs as footers which adjust for leveling.

For 59 Swiss francs, the Molger is a Scandinavian sauna-type bathroom rack in solid hard wood that's available as shown or as a 5-tier tower. The latter so happens to be perfectly sized for narrower kit like Red Wine Audio, the Onix SP3 and a small MacBook with its screen opened.

Besides looking good, being super sturdy and wide enough to hold two standard components per tier, the Molger doesn't use solid shelves but slats. You won't have to worry about plate modes or big reflective surfaces. Hey, we're serious.

I'm so molgerized, I've got four of 'em. Two are in the main sound room, with a cutting board bridging the gap for the Walker Audio Velocitor.

In my office cum headphone lounge, I've got another Molger underneath the table to hold the CDP for the desk top rig; and the 5-tier version for assorted smaller review components. The lounge chair is Ikea, the table is, the wall shelves are, the office rack is, the carpet is, the lamp... ours is the house Ikea built. What can I say, we love this stuff.

Besides being cheap but quality, this Molger bathroom furniture has another audiophile fringe benefit. It sounds good. I originally had that white glass table in the big rig which now houses the headphone amps and source. The new Molger setup is warmer and throws more depth. How do I know? I didn't change anything else when I swapped furniture. And no, I didn't retire my Grand Prix Audio Monaco racks because Ikea's beat 'em. For my new setup, the Monacos were simply too deep against the side wall where the equipment had to go. Fortunately, I never even sat Alvin's stuff up here. Hence I have no idea what I'm missing. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.


Bottom line? If you're sick and tired of paying through the nose for audiophile-approved accessories, hit the ol'e DIY trail and the aisles of Ikea. You'd be surprised just what you can find and put together there for very little coin while being très happy with the results on all fronts - aesthetically, functionally, sonically, financially.
Ikea website