10,000 Hz Records

On 1st Avenue in downtown Opelika, Alabama, 10,000 Hz Records has spent nearly a decade building one of the more substantial vinyl selections in this part of the state, with roughly 10,000 new titles in stock alongside a rotating supply of used records the shop buys directly from customers. The store’s owner, Russ, and his partner Hannah relocated from North Carolina to the Auburn-Opelika area a couple of years before launching the venture, starting it as a pop-up in early 2017 with, by Russ’s own account, little more than a few crates of LPs and a display stand. Bi-weekly pop-up events grew from that small setup into three car-loads of inventory before the pair opened a proper brick-and-mortar storefront in July 2018, in a building that had once housed the offices and warehouse of the Montgomery Cotton Company, one more example of downtown Opelika’s rail and textile-era buildings finding a second life as retail space.

The shop’s name traces back to a specific record: Air’s 2001 album “10,000 Hz Legend,” which Russ bought as his very first vinyl purchase at CD Alley in Chapel Hill after hearing a track on college radio and being drawn in by the artwork as much as the music. He had recently inherited his brother’s vintage turntable at the time, which made the purchase feel especially significant. He has described the name as a fitting coincidence given how much vinyl has come back into circulation since then, and the shop’s business model reflects that same instinct, restoring and reselling used records rather than treating them as disposable secondhand stock.

Beyond new and used vinyl, the shop carries CDs, cassettes, turntables, speakers, headphones, and the needles and cartridges that keep older equipment running, along with a small selection of apparel, gift cards and stickers. Like a lot of independent record stores, it went through a rough stretch during the pandemic, shifting almost entirely to online sales in 2020 before reopening its doors to foot traffic in April 2021, and it has operated close to full weekly hours ever since. The shop buys collections from customers on an ongoing basis, describing itself as taking in used vinyl just about every day, and the used stock gets folded into the same bins as new pressings rather than segregated into a separate bargain section. The shop’s own website is candid that its listed hours and details are sometimes more reliable than what shows up on Google, Apple Maps or other secondhand listings, and points customers back to the storefront’s own page as the current source of record.

The store keeps some of the longer hours in downtown Opelika’s shopping district, open seven days most weeks, eleven to six on weekdays, ten to five on Saturday and noon to five on Sunday, with only occasional closures, which makes it an easy stop whether a visitor is passing through on a Sunday afternoon or wrapping up a weekday errand run downtown. Its 1st Avenue address puts it a short walk from the rest of the historic district, itself the product of a revitalization effort that Opelika Main Street has led since 1987, turning former cotton-trade buildings like the shop’s own into the kind of storefronts that now anchor the district. For anyone building or thinning out a record collection, the shop’s willingness to buy collections directly from sellers makes it worth a visit in either direction, buying or selling, and the pairing of a record shop with the rest of downtown’s antique malls and vintage-leaning boutiques makes for a natural afternoon of browsing for anyone drawn to older, well-made things generally rather than vinyl specifically.