Brilliant Corners

Of more interest to me was the upstairs bar, described as a "lounge and listening space ... with bespoke cocktails and nightly selectors." During my visit there a few nights later, I spotted no selectors but did see a lovely looking and quite massive pair of speakers designed for the space by Devon Turnbull of OJAS. The enclosures resembled those of a 1950s Altec Voice of the Theatre. Turnbull told me that he built them with rare and sought-after components, like a pair of vintage Altec 288 compression drivers per side firing into 1803 sectional horns with double throats. Two cabinets, each containing an eye-popping 31.5" low-bass driver from Fostex, were built into the wall near the ceiling. A backlit alcove between the speakers displayed a Pioneer reel to reel, which provided the music. Around us, several couples sipped cocktails at tables in the large and blandly stylish room.

Two friends and I sat down at a table in front of the hi-fi, ordered a bottle of Grüner Veltliner, and listened. On the reel to reel was a recording of a deejay set someone had done at an earlier date: polite ambient and EDM tracks played back at a respectful volume. As the night wore on and more people arrived, the crowd noise began to compete with the music. People were talking and enjoying themselves, with no one seeming to pay much attention to the music, until the space began to sound not far different than any popular New York City bar.

As visitors filed in and out, more than a few stopped in front of the highly covetable hi-fi and took selfies. It occurred to me that the sound system served as a totemic object that signified exclusivity and cool but was essentially providing background music for the socializing and revelry. This, I realized, was the main difference between a Japanese kissa and an American "listening space." Being quiet and respectful in public accords with the Japanese character. I've been to crowded restaurants in Kyoto that sounded as hushed as poetry readings. But most Westerners—particularly Americans—experience silence in a bar or restaurant as uncomfortable and even strange. As most New Yorkers will tell you, the city is full of eateries so loud that communicating across a table requires shouting.

Turnbull told me that the "hardcore hi-fi system" he initially designed for the upstairs space at Public Records relied on purist, low-powered single-ended tube amps. "I conceptualized that system at the peak of COVID," he said. "This was a time when a lot of us were incorrectly optimistic about people's desire to listen in a bar. And it became immediately apparent that people wanted to party there. In the case of this system, the SET amps weren't powerful enough to drive the speakers above the crowd noise, and we couldn't trust most selectors not to push them into clipping territory. So we reverse engineered the hi-fi to get more headroom, and most of the time began using a more conventional pro amp, which worked much, much better."

Can anyone get a bar full of tipsy Americans to shut up? I considered this while visiting a restaurant in Manhattan's West Village called Port Sa'id, where some friends and I dined on genuinely superb Middle Eastern food in view of a pair of horn speakers so huge that they looked like they were designed for a castle or maybe a tech billionaire's post-apocalyptic underground bunker in New Zealand. I didn't hear these speakers, but down the hall I found my way to another impressive-looking hi-fi, this one inside a cozy bar. The space turned out to be the New York outpost of In Sheep's Clothing, which operates a terrific music and audio website and print magazine as well as a record store and event space in Los Angeles.

In Sheep's Clothing NYC turned out to be a far smaller space than the upstairs bar at Public Records, with more Japanese vibes. The hi-fi comprised a pair of Technics SP-10 direct-drive decks, a Luxman push-pull tube amp, a lovely custom-looking mixer-preamp, and two hefty horn speakers mounted above the bar and created by One A Way Sound Reproduction, an audio consultancy in Tel Aviv. Everything else was made of dark wood. There was a small rack of records available for sale. The wall facing the bar was outfitted with three stacked wooden pews reaching steplike to the ceiling that listeners could occupy like bleachers.

The space was crowded and downright rowdy. A singalong was happening at the bar. People were glued to their phones. A decidedly un-svelte young man—dressed in a homemade half-shirt, rubber boots, and a straw fedora—was making out with his girlfriend. Just another night at a downtown bar, except that when the bartender put on an LP—David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name—I could tell even over the crowd noise, which did not subside, that the hi-fi kicked like a mule.

After doing a little digging, I learned that the people who run ISC's NYC outpost aren't quitters. Determined to produce a more authentic kissa-ish experience, they offer "dedicated listening hours" every Monday afternoon from 2–5. Now this sounded promising! I showed up the following Monday promptly at two to find the bar mostly empty and miraculously quiet. The bartender handed me a card that listed the six records he'd be playing with informative and well-written descriptions, a kind of record menu for a session titled "Spiritual & Ambient Jazz." I ordered a mezcal cocktail and sat in the bleachers' middle row. Around me I spotted a young woman drawing on an electronic device, a couple on a date, and two young men whom I quickly recognized as fellow music and audio nerds.

The session's first record was one of my all-time favorites, Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda, played at a volume that made conversation difficult. Cecil McBee's bassline, which opens the title track, sounded taut but thunderous, as it should, Coltrane's harp was like sea spray against the rocks of the tanpura and bells, and the first notes of Pharoah Sanders's tenor made the breath catch in my throat. Here was a hi-fi that provided all the dynamics and snap of a large horn system with the euphony of tubes and the relentless pace of good direct-drive, a sound that remains difficult to experience in a typical New York City apartment.

When I looked around, everyone was engrossed in the music. I took another sip of the cocktail and felt happy. For the next hour and change, I experienced what I'd always wanted to—listening to recorded music in a communal space dedicated to that very thing, surrounded by great records and sound, appreciative strangers who seemed as excited as I was, and excellent drinks.

My dream of an American kissa shimmered for the next hour and change, until three guys in Bermuda shorts rolled into the bar. They were deep in the kind of braying, self-congratulatory conversation one hears often wherever financial-services brethren gather, and I could tell that neither the loud music nor the room of rapt listeners were going to get in their way. Their confab continued for the remainder of the listening session, and our dirty looks bounced off of them like acorns off of the roof of a station wagon.

Our reverie was in shambles, and rather than slipping into a private world of Jean-Claude Van Damme fantasies, I decided to chat with the bartender. A musician and mixologist memorably named Forrest Hackenbrock, he told me that he'd worked at several listening spaces, including a short-lived one operated by In Sheep's Clothing in Los Angeles. After bitching for a spell, I asked whether the management had considered encouraging or even enforcing silence in the Japanese manner, at least during the dedicated listening hours. "We tried posting rules and asking people to be quiet, but the response was pretty negative," he told me. "So now we play the records and hope for the best."

The conversation made me wonder whether this new crop of listening spaces will continue growing, and if so, what experience they will eventually settle on offering. I also posed the question to Devon Turnbull, who has more experience installing lofty hi-fi systems in public spaces than anyone I'm aware of. "I have no reason to believe that Westerners are interested in the Japanese listening-bar experience," he told me. "I've spoken to a lot of the other people in the US and Europe who have tried building these kinds of bars, and there's been a learning curve that everyone has been going through. But for the first time in a long time, people care about having good sound in commercial spaces. We will come out of this with something good, but it won't be the same as what people were originally emulating in Japan."

May it be so. If you live near one of these spaces, I encourage you to go experience it, preferably with friends. You may find yourself liking hi-fi listening away from home, and this intrepid social experiment deserves your support. And you may see or hear something you will begin to covet. But for the love of god, just keep it down!