Come in and tune out: Europe's vinyl junkies embrace the Listening Bar
More and more audiophiles are flocking to bars that have invested in top end equipment and a focus on vinyl. Euronews Culture speaks to the man who brought the phenomenon to Europe.
"This is the Kronos Quartet and Asha Bohsle. I love this album," smiles Paul Noble, seated on a stool opposite me wearing a cloth cap.
From the industrial ceiling hang small spotlight cylinders, super high-spec speakers and a glitter ball. A projector beams mildly psychedelic imagery onto one wall, while another boasts a generous spirits collection that basks invitingly in the effulgence.
Sonically obsessed from an early age, Noble had a lengthy career with BBC radio, notably producing the much-vaunted Maida Vale sessions. But in 2012, he found himself in Japan, and that's where his idea took shape.
"I went to Japan where they have a tradition of listening bars," he tells Euronews Culture. "And they could be tiny with six seats in them, maybe eight seats in them, and they just play records from start to finish on an amazing sound system. Usually there's a cover charge. So you're kind of already predisposed to go and listen and pay attention. They are all divided by genre so it's kind of an expression of the owner's personal taste so there'll be a jazz bar, there'll be a blues one, a classical music one. There's some kind of soft rock ones. It's nothing to do with club culture. It's nothing to do with DJing. Some might have you know, one turntable one CD player. I just completely fell in love with it. I couldn't get enough of it."
Trend or bandwagon?Listening bars have become something of a trend in recent years but since the end of the pandemic (which cut short Spiritland's presence at the Royal Festival Hall) more and more bars are, wittingly or otherwise, becoming seen as part of the audiophile phenomenon.
What qualifies a premises to exist in this burgeoning category, however, is up for debate. After all, what separates a 'listening bar' from a normal bar that plays music or has DJs? For Noble, it starts with the sound system. At Spiritland, the system is made by high-performance audio product trailblazer Living Voice, who engineer speakers to represent as faithfully as possible the sound of the acoustic instrument and not to seemingly compress the sound, which Kevin Scott, who heads up the Derbyshire manufacturer, believes conventional speakers do.
"I was already buying stuff from them," says Noble. "I was on my own audio journey. They make some wild high-end speakers that can cost up to a million pounds with rare woods and gold finishes, but they also make some real-world ones, so I got rid of my whole sound system at home and bought from them for my lounge. And then we talked and they built this system for us. It was their tech but we had input on the design."
"We just put our flag in the sand saying 'this is a listening bar'. Lots of people came in and were saying "oh you can't dance, there are chairs all over the dance floor". It's not a club. We didn't put a kitchen and a radio studio in the corner accidentally. This is us saying this is what we're about. There's DJs playing every night, we do talks, we do lots of work with the record industry, with literature and film, and because of the room and the design and the sound system, we do lots of album launches," Noble explains. "We've done Dylan, The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Jack White."
Friends in hi-fi placesA few miles east of here is a bar that has been linked with this hi-fi culture in some quarters, but perhaps the categorisation is misplaced.
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