Cool project, very interesting.
I only had the pHat Beat so I was making my own case anyway. What I did was repurpose and old subwoofer box from my Logitech R20 speakers. The amp had died so I just gutted everything. I mounted the pHat Beat where the subwoofer used to be. The VU meter is visible through the speaker cloth. I mounted the pHat beat to a Ninja diffuser, and then mounted that to the case. I put new wires on the speakers and wired them to the pHat Beat. I can’t access the buttons on the pHat beat, wasn’t all that fussy for them anyway to be honest, so I wired up my own buttons to the appropriate GPIO pins with a proto pHat. I used mini arcade buttons and mounted them in the top of the box. Black on Black.
Full build pictures here, https://1drv.ms/f/s!AjOYwiwlwDtpgrJY6ORLsK5AVpwNuw
I had an IR remote control hooked up but it didn’t work reliably. It would just randomly stop working. Might have been the cheap remote I was using though? Or my code, not sure. I was usually running headless when the remote quit so I never saw what happened. I have plans to buy a good quality media remote and have another go. Not sure when that will happen though. My thread on how I did it is here if you want to have a look see. Use a media keyboard with your pHat Beat, can it be done?