In a lot of Southeast Asia, the thought of a bar is slowly being reshaped. Instead of music competing with chatter or cocktails, listening rooms are inviting folks to decelerate, sit again and really hear what’s being performed.
In Bangkok, the tradition is especially seen. At Siwilai Sound Club in Bang Rak, one ground is reserved for jazz and one other for vinyl. Freaking Out the Neighborhood, hidden on Sukhumvit 36, feels extra like a good friend’s front room than a bar, with albums performed complete and a crowd that arrives to hear slightly than discuss over the music. And then there may be Lennon’s, a high-rise bar with a set of over 6,000 information, the place you possibly can browse, request, and settle right into a late night.
The 33-seater Middle Room in Bengaluru is an audiophile’s dream
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Hong Kong has had its personal model of the motion for years. Potato Head’s hidden Music Room constructed a repute with its wood-panelled interiors and assortment of 1000’s of information, whereas Melody in Sai Ying Pun continues the Japanese listening-bar custom with rigorously designed acoustics and low lighting that locations the music first.
The idea of the listening bar traces again to Japan within the Forties. After Second World War, when the nation was reeling from devastation and poverty, the leisure business too was in shambles. People would collect in small espresso retailers, known as kissa, to hearken to music performed on transistors. What started as an intimate type of communal listening has, over the many years, developed into a world phenomenon.
The cocktail programme at Baroke doesn’t take away from the superior sound
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In India, the listening room stays a younger thought. Collectors exist in each main metropolis, however areas that place music on the coronary heart of the evening are nonetheless uncommon.
Put that file on
At The Dimsum Room in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda, a listening room (1,000 sq. foot) opened in February this 12 months, tucked throughout the restaurant. It seats nearly 40 folks, dim-lit and acoustically handled, with a gently pitched ceiling and enormous audio system.
The Listening Room at Dimsum Room
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Manan Surti
Mayank Bhatt, founding father of All In Hospitality, which runs The Dimsum Room, insists this isn’t one other restaurant with background music. “People often equate listening rooms with vinyl bars, but in many vinyl bars the music becomes an afterthought. What I wanted was a space where the music is part of the reason you came, loud enough to matter, but not so loud that you cannot lean over and chat. A space where vinyl lovers feel at home.”
For Mayank, the selection to dedicate worthwhile actual property to a listening room was deliberate. “If I were to make it a private dining space, I could be making ₹50–60,000 a night,” he admits. “But I’m committed to keeping this restricted to listening, to vinyl. Food and drink are served, but they’re not the point. They’re just an add-on.” To construct the area, he collaborated with Kapil Thirwani, director at Munro Acoustics India and an knowledgeable in sound and acoustic design.
The Middle Room staff
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Just a couple of miles away, one other variation on the theme has appeared at Baroke, inside Krishna Palace Hotel, Nana Chowk on Mumbai’s Grant Road. The lodge itself has lengthy been related to Mumbai’s nightlife, and Baroke appears like a reinvention of that legacy. Here, the thought just isn’t a hushed listening room however what founder Saurabh Shetty, director at Krishna Palace, calls a listening bar. “The listening room concept ensures people don’t mind sitting in one place with a drink, just listening. That’s a lot to ask of a Mumbai crowd. So we re-christened ourselves a listening bar in July this year, where music is still first, but the bar experience matters too.”
The consideration to element is obsessive. “We actually have a decibel metre on the DJ console,” says Hector Kavarana, advertising and marketing and communications lead at Baroke. “The loudest our music goes is 85 decibels. DJs can see it, sometimes even patrons can. It’s our way of ensuring Baroke doesn’t slip into becoming just another loud club.”
At Baroke, the gathering spans about 220 vinyls throughout genres like rock, pop, reggae, disco, and even just a little instrumental.
Inside Baroke
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For those that need solitude, the bar has headphone stations — the place visitors can plug in and tune into the vinyl instantly, even when there’s chatter close by. The bar additionally labored with a sound guide to put in Klipsch La Scala audio system — handcrafted, imported, and hardly ever present in business areas in South Asia.
Curation is central. The programming dealt with by a veteran of Mumbai’s vinyl scene, Wilber Texeira, curator of Baroke’s weekend nights, is a famend DJ and sound designer. “It looks simple enough,” Saurabh notes, “but there’s a lot of music science that goes into even a Tuesday night. And unlike a regular club, we don’t take requests.”
A brand new idea
In Bengaluru, the temper shifts once more at The Middle Room, which opened in July this 12 months. The 33-seater listening room, which has a chosen area from the principle cocktail bar, operates on time-slot bookings, providing listeners two-hour home windows to settle in with music. Inside, wooden and crimson accents set the tone, warmed additional by a glossy Technics SL-1200 MK7 turntable from Tokyo and a wall stacked with over 1,000 LPs.
Baroke
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For Akhila, the stability is delicate. “We can capitalise on the bar, but it’s very hard to just monetise. What we realised early was that we needed to be clear about what we really wanted to focus on. While we’ve put a lot of attention into the food and drinks, we were very clear from day one that the sonic experience would be at the heart of it.”
To obtain that, they engaged two senior programmers to form the listening expertise, proper right down to sequencing tracks for every slot. “Bengaluru once had a big, vibrant live music scene that isn’t as visible today. This project leans into that memory, and people have responded warmly. At the same time, we also see guests who come because it’s a new space and they’re curious,” says Akhila.
An evening out at Middle Room
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For Hyderabad-based duo DJ and producer Sri Rama Murthy, who goes by Murthovic, and artistic director Avinash Kumar aka Thiruda, who helm a transmedia artwork undertaking known as Elsewhere In India, curating the sound at Middle Room is as a lot about investing in neighborhood as in sound. “We didn’t want just a hi-fi home setup but something immersive, a hybrid between a listening space and a small performance venue,” says Murthovic.
To do this, they introduced in a Danley Labs system, designed by former NASA scientist Tom Danley, identified for his patented speaker applied sciences. “We also went to Japan to buy Technics turntables — still the gold standard — and added an all-analogue rotary mixer for warmth and clarity. The room itself was treated like a studio — from the acoustics to the lighting.”
Murthovic and Avinash additionally see the area as a hub for dialogue and change. Alongside gigs, they host talks and workshops in collaboration with native sound researchers and engineers.
New and previous listeners
In Goa, the idea is taking a extra relaxed form. For The Record, tucked into the heritage lanes of Panjim, just isn’t strictly a listening room however a vinyl-led café-bar. It is drawing in a youthful crowd who are nonetheless easing into the tradition.
Goa-based photographer Daniel D’souza, who’s in his mid-20s and a daily, sees it as one thing completely different from the State’s regular nightlife. “The food and cocktail programme is top notch,” he says. “They were playing a Daft Punk vinyl one night, which was great. The music is thought of, and the whole concept is just different from a regular bar.”
For vinyl collectors, the enchantment of listening areas lies much less in nostalgia and extra in constancy. Mumbai-based content material creator and entrepreneur Aneesh Bhasin, who has constructed a sizeable vinly assortment over time, believes what issues most is the set-up. “If you’re going to get a cheap turntable and hook it up to a regular Bose speaker system, there’s no point apart from it looking cool. You’re actually better off streaming music,” he says. For Aneesh, who owns a classic 1978 Luxman amplifier from Japan and a German ELAC speaker system, vinyl is about extracting each layer of sound. “It’s not a cheap hobby. If I’m buying a record at ₹3,000 on average, I want to get the most out of it.”
Still, he admits to a priority about India’s rising listening tradition: “My only reservation is that the owners and promoters are putting in the work, but how many people are actually caring about the sound? I hope that changes, and it doesn’t just become background noise when you’re dining.”
But for all of the romance round vinyl and sonic immersion, there may be additionally the laborious arithmetic of operating such areas in India. Diganta Chakraborty, Bengaluru-based founder and CEO at Elemental, which operates throughout three spheres of F&B — personal areas, consumer options, and curated experiences — places it plainly: “You can’t have it small in Bengaluru. The alcohol licence itself costs a crore. If your total expenditure is ₹2.5–3 crore, you need to make that money back in four or five years, which means the space has to be larger.”
From his perspective, listening rooms are solely viable when it’s folded into a much bigger revenue-generating bar. “You have a cocktail bar that’s making the money, and within it you create a listening room for 30–40 people. The moment it becomes too large, it ceases to be intimate, you’re just listening to what others want you to hear.”
