Record Collecting

A year or two ago I was sitting at my kitchen table staring at my record player on the floor a few feet away, amidst a tangle of power cords and speaker wire, and decided I needed some furniture or something.

I find media cabinets very boring, whether they're boxy or curvy. I started thinking about what else I could do to get the player off the floor and keep everything a little more 'neat'.

Maybe it was the music I was listening to at the time - my mind was leaning towards something industrial but clean. Could I connect everything with pipes? Hide all the wires? I started sketching out some ideas, and the more I ran with it, the more I liked it. I could hook everything to this free-standing frame of pipes, so the speakers, record player and amplifier were all "piped" together with no cords visible anywhere.

It all worked great! I used black steel pipe and fittings and ran all the power cords and speaker wires inside the pipes.

A record player is by definition a more physically interactive piece of stereo equipment than most, and I wanted this design to keep that in mind. For instance, standing in front of it, the speakers and amplifier are all angled slightly upwards towards your ears and eyes. So, changing the record, starting it, etc, you're in the perfect position to also adjust volume, tone, etc, and get a good stereo experience from the placement of the speakers.

I originally started this post to talk about some records I recently found online, which have taken me years to find. I'll post more on this later. I haven't yet received them in the mail, so maybe I shouldn't jinx it all. :)