In Seattle, some music fans are paying $20 to hear albums they could stream at home, and they are selling the room out.
At Shibuya HiFi, guests can chat and sip cocktails in the lounge, then leave behind their drinks and their shoes as they settle into the back room for full-length albums in a communal setting. An evening might feature anything from Bjork to David Bowie.
One fan, who showed a Bowie tattoo, said, “I had to be here! It’s the closest thing I could get to a David Bowie concert.”
Shibuya hosts around 80 curated sessions a month, and they regularly sell out. Quentin Ertel, the co-owner of Shibuya HiFi, said that appeal comes from focused listening.
“That seems to me to be something that people are really rediscovering: that pleasure and the beauty of focus and intentional listening,” Ertel said.
Shibuya HiFi takes its name from a neighborhood in Tokyo. In Japan, listening bars, often called jazz kissas, started gaining popularity in the 1930s.
Similar venues have expanded in the United States in recent years, including noma hifi in Edina, Minnesota, XO HiFi in Kansas City, Missouri, and ESP HiFi in Denver, Colorado.
Artist and engineer Devon Turnbull described these spaces as a “new wave” of listening bars.
Turnbull designs high-end, handmade audio equipment for his company Ojas. His speakers often go into private living rooms, but he has also created larger public listening spaces.
The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City is showing what Turnbull has called his “HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3,” installed in what was once Andrew Carnegie’s private library.
“Pursuit is a really important part of the title,” Turnbull said. “I am not here to say that I have made the ultimate sound system. This is about my pursuit as a builder, as someone who’s passionate about building audio equipment and listening to music through it.”
Turnbull works out of a warehouse in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard. He said his interest in audio started early.
“My mom always told me that I used to just crawl to the living room and just sit in-between the speakers,” he said.
Turnbull said the move to digital music, first mp3s and later streaming, gave people access to millions of songs they could hear everywhere, but changed his relationship with listening.
“I realized I was really, like, losing touch with the way of listening to music that was moving emotionally for me,” Turnbull said.
He then spent time in Japan, sourced old parts and built custom equipment as he developed his craft.
“I see it as a folk art, making the kinds of things that I love making,” he said.
In his speaker-building workshops, Turnbull has tried to get younger listeners thinking about all aspects of sound. He said a listening room is about more than the sound system alone.
“As much as the way it looks is important, just the smell and the light and everything, the comfort of the seat, that all contributes to the experience,” he said.
For Brandon Stalling, an attendee of “HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3,” the appeal is the chance to sit quietly and listen.
“To sit and be quiet, it’s a lost form, it’s a lost art,” Stalling said. “To have a space to sit and just wonder and be in your own thoughts and be able to sit quietly and just let the music kind of take you on that ride, I think that’s the type of journey that needs to happen a lot more.”
A space devoted to listening, in a museum or a bar, can also give people access to a sound system that might otherwise cost tens of thousands of dollars to own.
Turnbull said he is already thinking about what “HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 4” might look like.
“I just love making this stuff, you know?” he said. “When my hearing is gone and my hands are shaky, I’ll still be messing around with circuits and speaker enclosures. I just love the process.”
Read more from CBS.
