Toneoptic rpm Record Cabinet This wall-mounted storage stores your records sideways, but rotates them 90 degrees when you pull them out like a drawer.

Yes, you can store your vinyl records in a milk crate like you’re a college kid in 1991. If you revere your grooved music collection the way many take care of their vinyl, though, you’ll probably want something a lot nicer-looking than a dirty plastic container. And if you’ve got the budget to lavish on your record collection, you might as well pick up the Toneoptic rpm.

A wall-mounted storage for your record collection, it’s, basically, a shelf that’s covered on every side except the front, allowing it to provide ample protection while still allowing you to admire the stack of album covers you’ve piled up over the years. Well, it’s a shelf with a twist and that unique element is what makes it quite the novel place to keep your treasure trove of music.

The Toneoptic rpm looks like a cabinet shelf with bookends on either side where you can slip in your vinyl for straightforward storage just like you store books at the library. While that’s common enough, the designer, Fabian Geyrhalter, has long found it inconvenient, as he had to physically pull out each record to check which one it is, since most of them don’t have large spines with easy-to-read titles. As such, they made the shelf function very differently for this one.

Those bookends inside the storage area actually stand on a rotating platter that’s mounted on a pull-out drawer. When you pull out the drawer, the platter spins, rotating the records stored inside by 90 degrees to face you, making it easier to find the exact album or single that you want. That way, you don’t have to pick through your records as if you’re finding a specific magazine in a thick pile, which makes it time-consuming to simply find something to play on your brand new automatic turntable. Instead, you can riffle through the stack the same way you would dig through a bundle of 12-inchers in a traditional crate.

The Toneoptic rpm measures 20.5 x 19 x 17.25 inches (width x height x depth), with enough room inside to accommodate between 60 to 75 records, depending on the thickness of the included covers. They also integrated dividers into the design, allowing you to properly organize your 12-inch, 10-inch, and 7-inch records separately. Of course, you can also remove the dividers, in case you plan to install multiple units of this, so you can have separate cabinets for each size of records. And yes, they do look lined up next to each other, looking similar to those wall cabinets people install in bedrooms and kitchens.

They offer it in either solid walnut or Finnish plywood construction, so these things are heavy (50 pounds apiece), with the walnut getting a natural finish and the ply getting a high-gloss water-based white acrylic paint coating. Other materials used include powder-coated high-grade 505 aluminum, Polyfelt record protector, and high-grade solid steel hardware.  Each of the storage units is meticulously handcrafted and assembled, by the way, in the otufit’s LA workshop. Oh yeah, they include mounting hardware for each cabinet.

The Toneoptic rpm is available now, priced at $3,750.

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