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.

I had been eyeing this cabinet for our movie collection for some time when I noticed that Amazon offered it at a price significantly less than catalogue. It is a great cabinet--well designed & well made. It holds a lot & has a small footprint. It is crafted from real wood (even the back panel) and is an exceptional value at this price. Our order arrived promptly. Yet, despite ample packaging, there were some small problems upon receipt--and this is the only thing which prevents a five-star rating. One shipping shelf had cracked and, more significantly, one hinge had worked loose, apparently during shipment, and in so doing, its screws took out some of the wood from lower left corner of cabinet body. Rather than return, we elected to repair this damage ourselves. The cabinet seems still to be strong & sturdy. The shelving is flexible; the doors raised a bit, so that they don't snag on carpets or rugs. Even if, in future, we should find it no longer necessary to maintain our movies in hard copy, I believe this handsome cabinet would still be useful for storing something else--a music collection . . . or craft supplies . . . or flower vases.

After checking out the reviews and competing products, this looked like a good deal. I ordered it, even though I'd never bought a piece of furniture on line before. The double box packaging was quite a remarkable thing to take apart -- no wonder the cabinet arrived all the way from China without a rub. The product I received far exceeded my expectations, but that is a relative judgment. In fact, it's a very well designed and well fabricated storage cabinet for over 600 compact discs. It is all nicely finished oak, including the shelves and apparently the back as well. The shelves, which seem a bit light, are supported by small but sturdy plastic brackets inserted into holes so you can adjust the height of the shelves. As I configured the cabinet for CDs, the main body of the cabinet has six longer shelves, while each door has six shelves of about half that length. The doors are held shut by small magnets of sufficient strength for the job (you would not want them any stronger, for if the door opened quickly after pulling on it with too much force the CD stored in the swinging doors might spill out). As any CD collector will know, some CD packages (apart from simple plastic jewel cases) can be taller than others: opera boxed-sets in particular can be too tall for some fixed CD shelving and you have to stack them horizontally, which wastes some space. But the shelving in this Leslie Dame cabinet leaves an ample extra margin for even Sony opera boxes, which are the bulkiest of all. A small qualification, however, needs to be noted: when opera sets in cardboard boxes were shelved both in the cabinet and on the doors, closing the doors so that the magnetic catch engaged was not easily accomplished. But a rearrangement solved that problem, and even if it hadn't solve it, the doors looked fully closed to the eye, so there was no appearance problem. The top of the cabinet is very wide, so you can use it for something like a lamp or a decorative item. One small caution: Only experience will tell how sturdy the hinge design will prove. The combination of the weight of the oak of the doors and a full load of CDs may -- perhaps -- over time stress the hinges. Only time will tell; but I'm guessing the manufacturer, who must want repeat sales, has thought about this and provided for it. I emphasize that I do not know this will be a problem, but it's worth thinking about as you use the cabinet so you will not inadvertently stress the hinges. Amazon or the vendor should include a photo of the cabinet open, so you can see its interior as well. It might enhance sales. This is both good quality and good design. It's a real bargain for the asking price (which seems, for some unaccountable reason, to fluctuate on Amazon. My measure of satisfaction is that I immediately bought a second cabinet and am tempted to buy a third, but we'll see.

The cabinet arrived looking beautiful. It was packaged well and didn't show any of the signs of rough handling that some other buyers unfortunately experienced. I filled it near to capacity, with just a shelf and a half left unfilled, set it against the wall, and breathed a satisfied sigh of relief - no more random stacks of CD's all over the office! That was 15 months ago. Things have changed. It's still gorgeous. It's still holding everything I put in in (about half a shelf remains unfilled). Technically it's still upright...but it looks like it won't be that way much longer. All of the screws holding both of the doors to their respective hinges are starting to pull out of the thin wood. Both doors now sag visibly, nearly touching each other at the top when they are closed. The attached picture shows just one of these hinges, but they all look roughly the same. It's only a matter of time before I try to open a door and it falls off instead. They already crack and creak alarmingly. There's no attractive way to fix the problem either: once those screws tear out, they're going to leave an awful set of holes. I had planned on buying another one when I filled this one up, but if this one couldn't handle <100% capacity, why waste $200 on another one? Very disappointing.

I was very apprehensive looking at some of the reviews but loved the design and storage setup. I believe that Leslie Dame has read some of the more critical reviews as many of those issues have been rectified. The packing box is now "double boxed", outside box is much heavier than the inside. The unit itself was wrapped in plastic with numerous areas protected with styrofoam (corners and front design) and wrapped with packing tape to ensure that they remain in place. One of the stationary shelves in the main cabinet did breakoff, HOWEVER, they sent 2 extra large shelves and 3 extra small ones. Very easy for hubby to fix, <5 mins. No need to call the company for anything. (LD cannot control how it is handled by the shipping company but mine arrived in great shape.) The finish is beautiful and the solidity is wonderful. It is solid and well made. I am very glad that I went with my gut instinct on this. (It's not a $600 piece of furniture but it is most definitely worth the price. Both myself and hubby are very pleased with this.

After searching for over 3 weeks I found the CD/DVD cabinet that I wanted. There are a lot of brands - Leslie Dame being one of them. I found Leslie Dame had the best choices for color, capacity and design. I was disappointed that as of March and April 2015 I could not order the 2 cabinets that I most wanted because they were seemingly not in stock anywhere in the USA even after a thorough search on Google. I heard from one distributor that they stopped carrying Leslie Dame because they were unreliable having items in stock, and that they had manufacturing quality issues since they started fabricating them in China. I didn't pay a lot of attention because they had the best choices for what I wanted. A month later I finally found one of the two models in stock sold by Amazon. They only had 5 in stock. I spent $300 and I thought that was expensive given the size dimensions (2 feet wide by 3.5 feet tall by 1 foot deep), but man I liked what I saw. By the time it arrived I had been shopping for 1.5 - 2 months and I was excited to finally have a compact place to store all of my DVD's and CD's. But... The item is solid wood - that's what I liked about it and what justified $300 for the size of the piece of furniture. However, here is where we found issues: -The color did not match what we saw on our computer monitor. It was far enough off that it was not due to the computer monitor. There is just a lot of variation. -The color of the shelves varied quite wildly from shelf to shelf. Some looked almost cherry and some looked like dark oak. -It is "solid wood" but the density and consistency of the wood was also highly variable. I held two identical shelves in each hand and the one shelf was at least twice as heavy/dense as the other. I switched hands to be sure and it was not my imagination. -The holes drilled on the inside for the shelf support brackets are completely off for 3 of the shelves. There is a good 1/4 - 1/2 inch difference in height for at least one of the four holes on 3 of the 15 or so shelves, which makes for an awfully wobbly shelf. Once the discs are on it it is less of a problem, but still it is shoddy. -The whole unit feels sort of loose and wobbly after it has some weight in it. There is way too much give in the construction. I could shift the unit a good inch in any direction from the top and the bottom stays still. -One of the shelf pegs was deformed plastic and unusable. They give you four extra, which is enough for one shelf, but it's unnerving that even their plastic injection molded pieces are a bit shoddy in how they're fabricated. I would like to return this item and find a different manufacturer, but as of the time that I wrote this the other options out there don't seem as appealing on paper. They would also require 2 or more units to store the same number of discs. And the dimensions don't match the space I need. I would like to return this item, but I am not sure I'm willing to deal with finding packaging that I can use to return it, and if I have to pay shipping it'll probably be prohibitive as far as the cost. I might also add that when I could not find the Leslie Dame products that I wanted in stock anywhere in the country, I called the manufacturer twice and emailed them once. The email bounced because their mailbox was full and the phone calls were not returned - not even now, 1-2 months after both messages were left.