Brilliant Corners

In a scene from The Silence of the Lambs—a film that for all of its camp happens to be nearly perfect—FBI cadet Clarice Starling asks caged psychopath Hannibal Lecter for help in figuring out a serial killer's motives. "Do we seek out things to covet?" Lecter responds, following Starling with his eyes as though she were his next meal. "No," he continues, "we begin by coveting what we see every day." Lecter's astute observation applies equally well to audiophilia. Much of this hobby consists of coveting: before we own a component, we usually spend a long while imagining all the ways it will improve our lives.

And how do we begin to covet? In my case, my father's hi-fi introduced me to the practice of close listening. It was cobbled together from mostly Soviet-bloc gear, and the fact that it didn't sound particularly good was rather beside the point. What mattered was participating in his ritual of putting on a record, sitting down in front of the speakers, and sharing a contemplative experience. The illuminated altar created by his small stack of components still appears in my dreams.

While working at my first job, I was introduced to better sound by a colleague who became a lifelong friend. Boris listened to ProAc Future One floorstanders driven by the gaudy-looking but lovely sounding VAC Renaissance Thirty/Thirty power amplifier, with bits converted by a dCS Purcell processor. Boris listened mostly to classical CDs, and his system played them with nearly electrostatic clarity and remarkable ease, despite the well-known pitfalls of early digital sound.

Because of these formative experiences, I knew early on that close listening at home using perfectionist gear was something people did—and something I was going to pursue. While working with Boris, I haunted hi-fi salons for deals on used gear that would eventually replace my very modest college system. A lifelong interest was sparked.

But what happens if none of your family or friends own a decent hi-fi? How do you even discover that this hobby exists? Especially if you grow up poor, as I did after coming to the United States, a great audio system can seem like something hidden away behind the locked, alarmed doors of affluent homes. There are still plenty of terrific audio retailers out there who recognize that exposing young listeners to good sound builds cultural value and makes business sense. Then again, I have vivid memories of salesmen working on commission being visibly reluctant to play a system for a young person without the obvious markers of having money. And I recall one New York hi-fi salon owner's wife following Black customers around the store without a trace of self-consciousness, a practice that understandably horrified the store's other employees.

But what if there were a place besides the home or hi-fi shop to encounter close listening and good sound? What if the experience could be available for the price of a drink? And what if the place where this happened turned out to look and feel really cool? As it happens, this idea first took root in Japan, where a network of listening cafes, or kissa, sprung up after the advent of electronic recording in the late 1920s and reached its full flowering after World WarII.

The function of the kissa was not to feature live music but to create a place where people listened seriously to recorded music and shared their connoisseurship. These cafes addressed the fact that foreign records were too scarce and expensive for many Japanese listeners—as was much of the better playback equipment. Kissa began to offer mostly jazz after the war, when French and American films with jazz soundtracks began to make their way to theaters, and especially after Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers' vastly influential first Japanese tour in 1961. (Classical music listening cafes, called meikyoku kissa, proliferated as well, though in smaller numbers.) By the mid-1970s, there were roughly 500 jazz cafes in Japan, and many neighborhoods in Tokyo had a half-dozen kissa where fans could listen to new releases and fill gaps in their musical knowledge.

Most kissa proprietors played jazz records on high-quality systems while serving coffee and alcoholic drinks in dimly lit, atmospheric spaces to small groups of mostly regulars. If you haven't had the chance to visit one of these delightful places—hideaways with names like Flamingo, Lady Jane, and New Dug (which is featured in Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood)—imagine a dark-wood bar filled with old furniture, framed record covers, shelves of LPs that sometimes number in the thousands, and huge horn speakers from the likes of Altec Lansing and JBL. Many kissa occupy quiet side streets and are run by a proprietor known as a master, or masutā in Japanese. Traditionally, the master is a jazz expert and chooses the records with minimal input from the visitors, who are expected to remain quiet while the records are played. In the popular imagination, these cafes are not places for socializing but rather for the intellectual, aesthetic, and even spiritual pursuit of listening. The house rules posted at a Tokyo kissa called Jazz Position Ongakukan crystalize this notion: "Welcome. This is a powerful listening space. Please 'dig' your jazz. We ask that you observe silence while the music is playing."

I find the proposition of a public listening space downright exciting. Not only because it offers a chance to move beyond one's own record collection and taste but because of the prospect of cultural fellowship—of appreciating great music played back well in the company of others. Though much of this hobby is solitary, many of my favorite moments happen while listening with friends, discovering their favorite records, and being impressed and sometimes moved by their taste, acuity, and observations. You can probably relate. And of course there's the excitement of access to exotic gear—for many older Japanese, an afternoon at a kissa was their first exposure to reproduced sound good enough to sit down for.

My enthusiasm turns out to be hardly unique. While the number of kissa in Japan has been declining since the 1990s, over the past several years a new crop of listening bars have sprung up in the West, with notable examples opening not only in Los Angeles, London, and New York but also in less expected locales like Denver, Dublin, Barcelona, Miami, Oakland, Berlin, São Paulo, and Tel Aviv. For the first time in ages, people everywhere seem to care about sound quality in public spaces—a development driven in part by the increasing popularity of vinyl records—and about welcoming young people to these spaces. This strikes me as the most exciting thing to hit hi-fi in ages. The only question is how a Japanese-style kissa experience might adapt to the listening public in the West.

To find out, I dropped into a few listening spaces here in New York. Though I found more than a dozen restaurants and bars that cottoned to that description, some struck me as little more than eating and drinking establishments with better-than-average sound systems. I narrowed the candidates down to places that 1) offered truly exceptional and intentionally designed hi-fis and 2) encouraged listening as the main activity.

My first stop was Public Records in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn (above and heading photo), which has grown into a compound that includes a bar-restaurant, a record shop, a concert venue, and a lovely outdoor garden with a deejay booth. On a recent afternoon, I ate lunch in the cavernous dining room among well-dressed patrons who clearly understood the symbiotic relationship between attractive young people and ambitious spaces. My grilled cheese and green tea were pretty good, too.