Choosing the right piece of furniture to store vinyl records can be a chore. There’s no allowance in modern home theater pieces for bulky vinyl. Storing vinyl records properly is important to ensure that they don’t become warped. It’s also a good idea for your vinyl collection to look good, as one of the common reasons we like vinyl is the ‘feel’ and ‘class’ of it, so it would be a shame to not put that on display in our homes.
The Ikea Expedit is the perfect, cheap solution to vinyl storage. It comes in a variety of configurations that will suit most living rooms. The most common configurations that readers will go for, I imagine, are the 4×1 and 2×2, but it also comes in the huge 4×4 configuration.
The Expedit holds up to around 80 records per box at its most tightly packed. 70 is the sweet point where the box is full but not so much that you can’t flip through your records.
Let’s face it: the main reason people like the Expedit is it’s so cheap. At around $50-$100, it’s a single purchase that’ll set a lot of new vinyl collectors up for years.
Downsides of Using the Expedit To Store Vinyl Records
Whilst cheap, reasonably pretty and compact, the Expedit does have its downsides. The build quality is about what you would expect from Ikea, which is to say it’s bad. It’s hollow plywood, and it won’t do well in having any audio equipment put on it due to vibrations. People in small rooms may want to put their turntable on top of the Expedit unit in order to save space, but it’s such a thin wood that it will vibrate and do nothing for your sound.
It can also look a little cheap too. If surrounded by expensive audio equipment, the Expedit might look a little oddly placed.
As the picture shows, the Expedit also has no back. Theoretically, the records could fall out the back of the holes. With reasonably careful handling of the records this shouldn’t be a problem, but some people have got around this issue by attaching an extra bit of plywood to the back.
Leave a Reply