If only one piece of equipment had the wooden front there's a good chance it would look out of place, but I gather from Ian's initial post that the product line is expanding to the point that you could potentially have a rack full of similarly configured components. At that point I think the wooden fronts would start to look pretty slick.
One question I had is whether the sheet metal holding the controls would be flush with the front of the wood or whether the controls would end up recessed into the cut-out. I'm not sure which answer I want, since recessing the controls would make it easy to support a metal front or a wood front but would also interfere with access to controls.
The one use case I see being problematic is the following :
- initially customer buys a single Axiom component to use with their other existing electronics (so black metal front plate strongly preferred)
- subsequently customer purchases other Axiom components, now having them all with matching wood fronts might be really cool
This implies an update path from metal to wood without recessing the controls too far behind the wood. Maybe we just need really thin wood ?
I imagine a reversible panel with black metal on one side & wood on the other would be too much to ask for
