m d's Profile

A few apartments ago, I had my plasma on its stand, sitting on a working fireplace. The mantel was about 8 inches deep, solid marble. All of the walls of the apartment were either brick or plaster, and the landlord/lease wouldn't allow me to mount anything other than pictures. While I was initially a bit freaked out about leaving it on the mantel, I made sure of two things: that the mantel didn't get hot when I used the fireplace, and the smoke of the fireplace didn't seem to escape in the apartment, rather solely up the chimney (it was a pretty deep fireplace). Did I risk taking some life off the tv? Probably. But it was the right solution for me. As previously mentioned, I was able to easily run the cords along the mantel, which really nicely masked the cables.

To this day, I still keep my tv at about that height (or slightly higher), mounted on a wall. It's the perfect height to watch sitting on my furniture with feet up and also while standing in the kitchen.

A cheaper version, with less connectivity options (just USB) is the
Thermaltake BlacX. We use the N0028USU at work for our plenty of uses in the IT department, and we buy them for just $40. We use them in linux and windows computers.