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High Fidelity, Amityville
best for weekly trips
Perhaps the most jam-packed of all the shops on the island, High Fidelity Records and CDs has served Amityville for 17 years.
Despite the scarce walk room, it is not uncommon to find a several of the shop’s several dozen regulars browsing the bins. The store’s backbone is its inventory of used vinyl and CDs. To help those on the prowl for a particular album and his regulars who like to keep up with his latest inventory, owner Marc Sendik puts his latest stock into 15 new arrival bins. After three weeks, he cycles those albums out into respective used sections to unveil fresh second-hand batches.
The store’s ever-growing inventory of used products is it’s backbone, but owner Sendik said he fulfills many requests for new releases, lately for millennials and zoomers. “Good music is good music no matter what generation its from,” Sendik said. “They’re buying a lot of Hendrix, Floyd and Zeppelin and stuff. But they’re also coming in for War on Drugs, The Black Keys, Greta Van Fleet, newer acts like that.”
Record stores were not immune to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Sendik says closing down during that time was the greatest challenge he faced as a business owner of nearly two decades. Like many of the islands shops, he digitized his inventory for online sales, shipped orders to customers’ homes and towards the end of his time closed down, fulfilled orders for curbside pickup.
High Fidelity will carry RSD releases this year and Sendik said he is offering 20% off all other new and used projects, including RSD titles from previous years.