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Video: BDI furniture overview

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Welcome to this article from the Crutchfield archives. Have fun reading it, but be aware that the information may be outdated and links may be broken.

Bill Becker, the founder and CEO of BDI, talks about what makes BDI furniture so special and gives an overview of the Novia, Avion, Cirrus, Valera and Mirage furniture lines.

Read video transcript

Bill Becker:

Hi. I'm Bill Becker. I'm the CEO and founder of BDI. At BDI we're a design driven company so we really focus on how do we improve on products, how do we innovate, and how do we create something better. We're very much interested in creating products that improve on what's out there.

So one of the core values at BDI is sweating the details and that sweating the details really carries itself throughout the manufacturing process. We are very focused on the materials that we select. We're very focused on the hardware that we use and the design details that go into the product so that it meets the needs, for example, of a home theater system. Anybody who has a home theater system and looks at it realizes there's a tremendous amount of cable so we realized early on that it was important to control these cables and also to hide these cables. We use passive ventilation so the air basically, through convection, comes up through the underneath of the cabinet and out through the rear of the cabinet and that keeps the components cool.

It's really important to be able to get to the back of furniture so that's why we incorporated wheels early on. It's very difficult to move a large piece of furniture with a large TV full of components away from the wall and the wheels were a very, we felt was a very important innovation and something that really set BDI products apart from other things that were available.

A/V components come in all sizes and because of that the shelves really need to be adjustable and there needs to be good adjustability. All of our cabinets have threaded inserts and pins that are dampened so that the shelf doesn't vibrate and can easily be moved up and down and it's a very secure connection for the shelves to hold those very heavy components.

Avion was our first cabinet, our first enclosed product. For Avion we developed these doors that would be IR compatible so that it would work with IR remotes. Avion is in thousands of homes out there, and many, many people have really enjoyed using that product. We've recently redesigned Avion to make it even better, and we've added a steel structure so that it no longer has a middle leg. We've changed some of the other hardware and we've incorporated slow-close doors. Since one of our core values at BDI is continual improvement it was really important to us with Avion to make it the best product it could be and so we took a really great product and we made it better.

When we developed Novia, it was really to reach that customer that wanted all the innovations that BDI builds into our products but in a design that may be more compatible with a little more traditional home environment. The drawer that is used on Novia is a multi-function drawer. You can use it for your center channel speaker as well as for storage. The other features that Novia includes are slow-close doors so that as you close the door they don't slam shut, which is nice in a home theater environment that you don't really hear those doors when they close. Novia has a glass top. It's a black glass top which has a great look with the black TVs that are out there now and it really helps to integrate the TV in with the piece of furniture.

Cirrus is a cabinet that incorporates the features that BDI is known for. It has wheels. It has ventilation. The difference with Cirrus is it uses sliding doors as opposed to pivoting doors as most of our cabinets use. The sliding doors for many customers is appealing because you don't have a door that's swinging out and the door can be left open all the time if you want so if you want to have easy access to those components the door can basically be kept open.

Valera was a challenging product to engineer because you have a very wide span that needs to support the TV and so we have to use steel in Valera. Even though it's a wood stand it has steel incorporated into the structure. And the Valera stands are very sculptural. They really take advantage of the qualities of wood. Most of the Valera units also swivel, and Valera allows you to orient your TV to whoever is watching it.

One of our products that's designed for audio components is the Mirage 8222. So the Mirage 8222 has a very sleek appearance. It has black glass doors that are IR compatible and it's really designed to accommodate several A/V components and the cabling that's needed for those components.

We really want to make sure that the product that we produce is aligned with who we are as a company and so we're very focused on quality and we make sure that at all parts of the production of our furniture the people that are involved in it also are aligned with that core value of sweating the details.

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