I’ve been wanting to upgrade my vinyl record storage for a while now. I recently moved and decided to see what was available. I had been using cheap Ikea Kallax shelves for a while now and wanted to find something nicer.
The USM Haller shelves appealed to me in many ways except for one important one, price. They are asking $3500 for the one I was interested in. They tend to go way up from there as you add on more storage. That just wasn’t realistic for me.
I decided to look for alternatives to see if I could find the same look, at a comparable build quality, but at a much more attractive price.
My search turned up a number of options but many turned me off for various reasons. Mostly construction & build seemed off or cheap, or they were sold on suspect websites.
I then came upon this option on Amazon, which seemed to check all the boxes. It’s not cheap by any stretch, but compared to USM Haller, they are substantially more affordable.
While the price varies by size and style, the specific model I wanted was over 80% less expensive than a USM Haller.
I did some research before making the purchase. I did an image-match search and found what appears to be the same on eBay as well, such as here and here.
I felt better about my return options with Amazon if I ended up not being satisfied so I decided to take a chance with that one.
It arrived much sooner than the original expected delivery window. I received it 4 days after placing the order if my memory is correct. I caught the delivery driver laying putting it down rather hard. He didn’t know I was standing in the doorway. After it banged down a bit too hard for my comfort, he heard the front door open, glanced up and said, “my bad.” I took it inside and quickly dug into opening it up and seeing what I was about to get myself into.
Right from the start, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the parts. The poles are high quality, durable steel. Very attractive! Not cheap or remotely flimsy. The white panels were also on par with the original brand ones I’ve seen in my local DWR.
It came with decent instructions, albeit not perfect or overly explanatory, but they were adequate.
I was able to put it together without much frustration but there are times where you need to pay attention to photos and have an idea of the logic of how things need to assemble.
The only real confusion I had was with how the hinges attached. This is one area where the instructions lacked. It wasn’t hard or intricate but it wasn’t completely obvious. I was able to figure it out after a bit, and I’m sure I looked like a dog looking at its owner, with its head cocked at an angle, trying to understand the vague instructions. They simply slide into the appropriate side panel corner, with the screws loose, and then you tighten down the screws once they are fully seated as far as they’ll go into the corner. The metal rectangular piece serves as a little bracket that tightens down to hold the hinge in place. It’s a pretty simple in concept. The instructions say to loosen up the screws but they don’t really explain how much or what exactly that means. The screws were already loose and probably sufficiently so.
The one door wasn’t lining up as perfectly as the other so I reached out to customer support and they were very responsive, helpful, and genuinely concerned about my satisfaction. I realize this sounds exaggerated, or like a sales pitch, but it’s true. I felt like I was dealing with a local mom & pop shop who cared. They spoke decent English too, although I have no idea where they were located, but I assume not in the US.
The support rep also confirmed that each shelf can hold up to 66 pounds. Filling up each section with records would be heavier than that so I elected to not fill up the middle shelves all the way. I think having more weight on the bottom is pretty safe. The shelf construction feels strong enough to support it but I decided to not risk it on the middle shelves.
The naturally slick metal material makes the records want to slide around so I wanted to find a solution for that. I ended up buying large metal bookends and strong neodymium disc magnets to hold the bookends in place. I only used 2 bookends on each middle shelf but I put more on the lower ones to give all the records more support. I think I used 4 on each lower shelf, for 8 total on the entire bottom level.
Buying enough bookends and magnets wasn’t cheap, and added to the cost of the shelving solution, but I thought it was worth it. If you don’t have that many records then you may not need them.
One thing to note, and this wasn’t obvious from the description or photos, the locks do lock but they don’t give you a key. They told me that they are designed to be ‘locked’ by any thin metal item such as a coin. Their reasoning for this seemed like a cop out, “because customers easily lose keys”.
So they do lock if your only intention is to keep out toddlers or just someone being casually nosy, but if someone really wants to unlock it, it’s incredibly easy. You can buy locks that fit if you want to use a real key. There are sellers on eBay, such as this one, that sell locks and other parts, as well as nice quality felt that you can use.
In the end, I’m quite pleased with this purchase and will buy another piece from the same vendor again.
Here are some other cabinet styles from the same vendor I used. They come in other colors too.
