Listen Up

A New Class Of Cocktail Den Aims To Please Your Ears As Much As Your Taste Buds

- Matthew Kronsberg

Walk into Bar Shiru, a cocktail lounge that opened three months ago in uptown Oakland, Calif., and the first thing you notice is the back wall, where about 1,000 vinyl records are lined on shelves 15 feet high. Most of them are jazz: Giants such as Miles Davis face outward alongside current stars like Kamasi Washington. A few albums from hip-hop and R&B artists, ranging from A Tribe Called Quest to Prince to Aretha Franklin, round out the mix.

After ordering one of the bar’s signature highballs and finding a seat in the middle of the room, your attention will likely turn to the pair of Line Magnetic 812 speakers at the foot of this display. Their brass hardware, coarse-weave fabric screens, and top-mounted horns come offas relics from the 1950s. Nearby, the vacuum tubes of two LM-805IA amplifiers glow on either side of the DJ booth. But they’re not here as a piece of expensive design nostalgia: This old-school, hightech equipment renders beats and blue notes in the bilevel room with a you-are-there clarity.

Music—specifically, music played on a superior sound system—is becoming the latest competitive advantage for highend bars and cafes. Spiritland, which opened a 180-person “listening room”-style restaurant in London’s Royal Festival Hall in December, worked with custom speaker maker Living Voice to create its setup. In Sheep’s Clothing, a new all-day audiophile bar in Los Angeles’s downtown arts district, uses a $12,000 pair of Klipschorns to broadcast a vinyl collection put together for the joint by Zach Cowie, the music supervisor who gave Aziz Ansari’s Master of None its tuneful landscape.