A listening bar lives or dies by its sound system. You can have 10,000 records and the best cocktails in the borough, but if the speakers aren’t right, the whole thing falls apart. When we designed the audio system for Kissa Kissa, we started from a single principle: the music should sound the way the musicians intended it to sound — warm, detailed, and alive. Here is what powers our sound system.
Why Sound Quality Matters in a Listening Bar
A regular bar can get away with a Bluetooth speaker or a generic PA system. Background music is background music. But a listening bar asks something different of its guests: pay attention. And if you’re going to ask people to listen, you owe them something worth hearing.
In the traditional jazz kissas of Japan, the sound system is treated with the same seriousness as the coffee or the whisky. It is a core part of the experience. Many kissa masters spend decades refining their setups, swapping tubes, adjusting speaker placement by centimeters, obsessing over the warmth of the midrange. We brought that same approach to Crown Heights.
Harbeth Super HL5plus
Harbeth is a British speaker company with roots in the BBC’s broadcast monitoring tradition. Their speakers were originally designed for recording studios — environments where accuracy matters more than anything else. The Super HL5plus is their flagship monitor, known for a midrange that is unmatched in its class: natural, uncolored, and deeply musical.
For jazz, this matters enormously. The human voice, the saxophone, the trumpet, the piano — all of these instruments live in the midrange. A speaker that gets the midrange right makes a 1960s Blue Note pressing sound like the musicians are in the room with you. That’s not an exaggeration. When Art Blakey’s snare cracks through the Harbeths, you feel it in your chest.
ModWright Tube Amplifier
Tube amplifiers are the standard in serious listening bars for a reason. Solid-state amps are technically more accurate, but tubes add a warmth and dimensionality that is hard to describe and impossible to fake. The harmonics are richer. The decay is longer. The whole presentation feels more three-dimensional.
We chose ModWright, a boutique American manufacturer from Washington state. Dan Wright builds each unit by hand, and the result is an amplifier that pairs beautifully with the Harbeths — adding just enough tube warmth to the already musical British monitors without ever crossing into softness or distortion.
Vinyl as the Only Source
There is no digital source at Kissa Kissa. No Bluetooth, no streaming, no CDs. Every piece of music that plays in this room comes from vinyl. It is not a gimmick or a marketing choice. It is the entire point.
Vinyl forces a different relationship with music. You listen to an album as a complete work — the sequencing, the pacing, the arc from opening track to closing track. You hear the surface noise, the pops and clicks that remind you this is a physical object with history. And you hear the music the way it was originally mastered — in an analog chain, from microphone to tape to lathe to groove to needle to speaker to your ears.
Our collection of more than 5,000 jazz LPs has been sourced from around the world — original pressings, Japanese pressings, reissues from audiophile labels. Every record is cleaned, inspected, and treated with care before it goes on the turntable.
Hear It for Yourself
667 Franklin Avenue · Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Open seven nights a week
