I have thought about my bedroom dressers, which have solid sides built up from strips about 5" wide. Also my kitchen table top is solid wood.

Why, then, do they go to all the trouble of making floating panels for cabinets and drawer bottoms, if not because of expansion? I suppose it is as you say - you can use solid wood if you know what you are doing.

I have a bunch of oak (two guys I used to work with and I bought it in 1990 from some guy who cut it and planed it; $100 - it is worth ten times that now :), and it would be nice to build my woofer cabinets with it, but I thought that would lead to problems. Do you think that it would work ok? I had planned on using it for my mid-horns, but oak plywood for the woofers.