"Unlike most establishments like bars, cafés, and clubs, listening bars are designed with the perfect sound system in mind for the ultimate sonic geek."
“Think of them as galleries for audiophiles” (Exberliner, 2023), a space where you can actually stop and listen to the music, and have conversations around it. Unlike most establishments like bars, cafes, and clubs, listening bars are designed with the perfect sound system in mind for the ultimate sonic geek. This concept is said to have begun in Asia, Japan to be precise, in the 1950s, with side street coffee houses that embraced the idea of listening more and dancing less (Financial Times, 2023). Since then, the world over has caught up to this tradition and has gone as far as designing their sound systems according to Japanese standards for HiFis that are acoustically designed to enhance the enjoyment of music using precision-made speakers and the highest-quality turntables and amplifiers. In Europe and in the US, listening bars have become an increasingly favored way of consuming music in recent years, and this influence has trickled all the way down to the South. In 2021, South Africa and the rest of the African continent recorded its first ever account of a listening bar in Cape Town known as One Park Listening Bar.
Set in a hundred-year-old building housing The Other Records store, The Other Radio, which is an online radio station, an eatery and gallery, One Park Listening Bar sits on the first floor of the building otherwise known as simply One Park Precinct on One Park Road, Cape Town. Furnished and fashioned after Japanese listening bars, formerly known as Kissaten meaning tea-drinking-shop where artists and griots could meet and discuss topics related to their work over a cup of tea or coffee, One Park Listening Bar is a place for meet-ups and music of all kinds curated outside the pressures of dancefloor/DJ culture and is paradise for introverted record collectors and audiophiles who enjoying savoring the feel and taste of music on a high-fidelity sound-system void of any distortion or coloration.
This listening bar includes a one-of-a-kind DJ booth and a specialized speaker set designed by Phil Kramer. One Park's system is both classic and modern, using restored Altec cabinets from a 60s movie theatre, brand new CNC'd biradial horns and biamping. It's a hybrid approach that sounds as good as it looks and delivers a realistic and natural sound to the listener. In such a space, nobody cares if the DJ matches beats or sequences the songs accordingly, it is only the music that takes center-stage and not necessarily how it is curated or by whom.
One Park Listening Bar is not the only indicator of this rising trend in the South. This year, a production outfit based in Johannesburg known as Broaden A New Sound began experimenting with what they've dubbed as a pop-up listening bar; they call it Listen In. Through this initiative, they have been circuiting their pop-up listening bar across venues in Johannesburg and sort of slowly introducing this relatively novel concept most venues haven't really caught up to, or arguably cannot afford to set up yet. Broaden A New Sound is an events and sonic landscaping passion project by Colleen Balchin & her partner, Ri.
