Finer Sounds Brooklyn — Curated Vinyl & Hi-Fi Shop at Ace Hotel Boerum Hill
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: Finer Sounds
Address: 252 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA
Website: finersounds.com
Instagram: @finersounds
There is an old truth about record shops that the best ones have always understood: the shop is not really selling records. It is selling the moment before ownership — the listen, the consideration, the slow yes. Most shops lost that moment somewhere along the way, buried under volume and clutter. Finer Sounds, which opened in the summer of 2025 inside the Ace Hotel Brooklyn, has built its entire premise on getting it back.
The shop is the work of David Azzoni and Shota Iyobe, and their stated intent is disarmingly simple: to simplify music discovery through a curated selection of vinyl records and audio essentials. The Instagram tagline compresses it further — Curation Over Clutter — and the stock bears it out. This is not a shop that wants you to dig for hours. It wants every record in the room to have already earned its place.
The centrepiece is the listening station, connected to a custom sound system designed and built by the New York DJ and producer Nak. Consider what that means in practice: a shop where the listening equipment was commissioned, not bought — where hearing a record properly before taking it home is treated as part of the service rather than an afterthought. That is listening bar thinking applied to retail, and it places Finer Sounds closer to the culture this site maps than to the average record shop.
The selection leans into new electronic vinyl — house, techno, disco, IDM, ambient, new age — alongside soul, funk and jazz, and the shop's roster of favoured labels reads like a shelf assembled by someone who cares about provenance: Numero Group's archival excavations, Mr Bongo's Brazilian and African reissues, Sam Records' meticulous restorations of French jazz, Ghostly International, Leaving Records. These are labels built on rescue and care — music retrieved, restored, and re-presented properly. A shop that organises itself around them is telling you exactly what it values.
The setting deserves a word too. A curated record shop in a hotel lobby is a quietly important model. It places serious music in the daily path of travellers — people passing through Boerum Hill who might never have sought out a record shop, now three steps from one built on intent. The hotel lobby has always been a room about arrival; Finer Sounds gives that arrival a soundtrack you can take with you. The owners have plans to grow the offer — books, headphones and audio accessories, lightly used records — extending the shop from a place that sells music toward a place that furnishes a listening life.
It is young, small, and precise, open daily from 11am to 6pm. But the premise is the thing: curation as hospitality, the listen before the purchase, a room where every record has been chosen. That's the front door of listening culture. Brooklyn just gained a good one.
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Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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