Leslie Dame Solid Oak Multimedia Storage Cabinet with Classic Mission Style Doors, Black

I received this Leslie Dame CD-612D Solid Oak Mission Style Multimedia Storage Cabinet, Dark Oak yesterday and my wife and I are thrilled with it. The video will show you how it looks in my room and the amount of storage space it offers (both in the main part of the cabinet as well as in the doors). I admit I ordered it with some trepidation after reading some of the previous reviews here which mentioned shipping damage. But ours arrived in absolutely perfect condition. Its packing is superlative; it has to be because the cabinet, almost completely assembled, is shipped from China to the West Coast and then, in our case, across the country to our home on the East Coast. Frankly, I think shipping damage to this item would be a real rarity. When I say "almost completely assembled," I mean just that. The only things the buyer must do is to remove, with a small Phillips-head screwdriver, two (or four) L-shaped metal attachments which holds two long shelves affixed by the factory for sturdiness in shipping (removing these attachments and placing a shelf on another level may not be necessary, depending upon what you intend to put on it; I only needed to remove two of the L-shaped attachments for one of the shelves to place that shelf on another level), insert the small plastic bolts (four per shelf) into the appropriate holes and then put each shelf into place. The buyer determines where the shelves are placed depending upon the use(s) he/she is contemplating. This can be changed at any time in the future should circumstances warrant. There are five long shelves and ten shorter shelves included; you may or may not need all of them. (There are sixty plastic bolts included; I wish Leslie Dame had included four more "just in case" but that is a small 'nit.') This gives you a maximum of 18 spaces in which to store your discs or tapes, 6 short spaces in each of the doors (12 total), and 6 long spaces in the center of the cabinet. In our case, I used all of the shelves (and all of the bolts) because I am going to use the cabinet exclusively for CDs. The bolts were tight going in but this means, of course, that they will not fall out. The instruction sheet is complete and clear. It took me less than an hour to get it completely ready, from the time of arrival, to the time of completion. Now Leslie Dame states that the cabinet will hold 612 CDs. They obviously mean 612 CDs in 612 standard "jewel box" cases. However, I own the Arturo Toscanini: The Complete RCA Collection which has 84 CDs and 1 DVD in a box taking up less space than 30 standard CDs (the CDs/DVD in this box are stored in cardboard sleeves) so I shall be able to get many more than 612 CDs into this cabinet.(I also own the Mercury Living Presence Boxed Set as well as several other boxed sets, all of which contain CDs in cardboard sleeves rather than CD "jewel boxes.") So the "612" figure will not apply to me; Leslie Dame's "Holds 612 CDs, 298 DVDs, or 172 VHS tapes, or any combination" may or may not apply to you. You may be able to store more too. Certainly you'll store no less than the numbers specified. It is a beautiful piece of furniture made of solid oak (the joins on the doors are even dove-tailed!) and, unlike most vinyl-clad fiberboard cabinets, it will look quite nice in any room of your house. Some people have mentioned, in a somewhat negative fashion, that it is made in China. It is. Would I myself have preferred that it had been Made in USA? Certainly! But I have to say that, no matter where it would be made, in my opinion the quality of construction couldn't be bettered, especially at the price. In conclusion, like most other reviewers here, I am completely pleased with this cabinet and I recommend it to anyone needing a nice media storage center. Thank you for reading this and for watching the video. Lawrence H. Bulk

First, this is the 3rd of these that I have purchased. The other two I purchased maybe 10 years ago from Amazon. Their quality was very good. I have read some reviews that say the manufacturer is some other company than the one I bought from 10 years ago and that the quality is now marginal (poor). Generally, I would say that is true. The wood is all very good to excellent. Wood pieces fitted together with dove-tail are excellent. The condition/finish of the wood is very good. Unfortunately, all of this comes together poorly. There is a left and right door and each is attached to the cabinet with three hinges. ALL of the hinges were poorly attached to the cabinet. Some of the screws were not screwed in straight, some screws were loose. I have attached a picture that I hope is clear for you. You can see (I hope) that the right half of the hinge is not flush with the wood. This is AFTER I screwed in all of the screws hoping that would pull the hinge in straight. It didn't. I suspect the reason is that the hinge was not set in the correct position to begin with. Because the three screws on the right were already skewed (not aligned properly) my tightening them could not pull the hinge to the correct position. I am keeping this cabinet even tho' the work is marginal. I don't think returning it to get another cabinet would help: I might even get a replacement that is worse! The cabinet is functional and is not something I will open and close often. It is not an eye sore in my home. It should hold together.

I did think that this item was priced pretty low for what it looked like in the photos; I think it looks really nice from a distance and does the job in concealing a ton of CDs. That is still true now that I have it in my home, full of CDs. However, it does have some quality issues that go along with the price ($247 plus tax, when I bought it). The stain quality is not great; I tried to take a close up showing the variation in color on one of the shelves in the attached photos. I ended up re-staining the outside of it to better match my furniture, and now one of the doors drags on the lower platform and has scratched it when opening and closing. It could be because of the extra layer of stain, but I think someone else complained that the doors wouldn't stay closed when fully loaded, so it could be that the hinges are a bit weak for the job tasked to them. (The door did not scrape the platform when it was empty.) The shelves are made out of some kind of feather-light wood--not balsa wood, but something very insubstantial. My biggest complaint is that the shelves (in my unit, at least) are positioned so that you can't evenly store six rows of CDs on their edges. One or two of the shelves in the middle portion are fixed in place, and they force an arrangement where at least one row is too short to place the CDs on edge, and then one shelf is much taller, even though there are several rows of holes drilled for positioning the braces that hold the shelves in place. Maybe this was just a quality issue affecting my unit alone, or maybe they are all like this. But all that said, it does keep all of my CDs hidden away, it's not made out of particleboard, and it was way cheaper than any other media cabinets in a similar style that I could find.