Right before the holidays, I discovered an Instagram account called @jazz_kissa, run by a photographer and music fan named Katsumasa Kusunose. Patrons of jazz kissas (cafés) typically drink coffee or alcohol and keep their voices low, sometimes reading books or comics as they listen. There are around six hundred such cafés in Japan—a number Kusunose and a few other fans carefully tabulated a few years ago, and which he believes has not significantly changed. Kusunose has been photographing these places since 2014, and his pictures became a ballast for me. The average jazz café is small, about the size of our living room, though a few are big enough to accommodate perhaps fifty people. Their audio gear generally looks older, and, even though I knew nothing about it, I decided it all sounded exquisite. A speculative leap, but I needed it.
A friend who knew of my obsession told me about another Instagram account, @_listening_room_. Someone was posting photo spreads from what seemed to be mostly Japanese audiophile magazines and translating the accompanying text. “Listening rooms” are essentially residential jazz cafés, though they are agnostic as to genre. You see enormous home stereo setups in these photos, gear from another era piled high in living rooms. The owner of the system is sometimes there, perched on a couch. I didn’t know then what it cost to outfit a listening room, but it was obviously not a budget undertaking. The combined practices of listening and reflecting in this kind of space made me think of the rooms as miniature cathedrals, places where anybody could enter and connect with a larger force through sound. (...)
When I started researching the individual components of these listening rooms, I encountered this language of bedroom expertise, of an axiomatic surety based on an invisible axiom. Certain speakers delivered sound that was “detailed” or “transparent,” whereas others did not. What was the detail being retrieved? Was it not being created in that moment by that machine? What was the referent for something being transparent? Transparent in comparison to what? (...)
Audiophiles often talk about what people will miss if they don’t have a specific kind of gear, as if recorded music were a fragile code requiring elaborate reconstruction. As much as I found myself opening up to the idea of building a good sound system over time, I still felt at odds with most audiophiles, or at least their representatives in the press. (...)
I met Jonathan Weiss in April 2021 at his loft in Dumbo, when a glossy magazine I hadn’t heard of asked me to write some copy for a photo spread. Weiss is a bright-eyed man, fifty-eight, with a head of thick white hair and an appealing intensity, but he was not the model. The photographer was coming to shoot the speakers made by his company, Oswalds Mill Audio (OMA). Its Imperia model, over six feet tall, is made up of two massive wooden horns held together by steel frames next to a woofer as big as a stove. These speakers look like a pair of military-grade butter churns, or crowd-control technology from the nineteenth century. I laughed when I saw them. According to a 2019 catalog, the pair costs roughly $452,200. (Weiss, who doesn’t like to discuss the price of his products, declined to confirm whether this was still accurate.) The new OMA turntable, the K3, is a three-hundred-pound hulk cast in iron with a tonearm that looks like a miniature boom crane. It was on the October cover of Stereophile magazine, and the review was positive: Michael Fremer called it a “truly great audio product.” The magazine listed the price at $360,000.
Unlike the tech bros burning through money both real and imagined, Weiss and the rest of the high-end audio cohort could at the very least drag their wares into the street and be of service, even though they are rarely thinking of the greater good. Gordon Gow of McIntosh Laboratory called this type of equipment “toys for insecure adults.” It’s not gear for the general population, and I would have left it alone if something hadn’t rearranged me. I had a feeling that the jazz kissa might be hovering around us.
The Imperia speakers made a sound that was wide and vivid and full of dirty weight, the breath of an organism. When the audio critic Herb Reichert hears this quality in good speakers, he calls it “believable corporeality,” which he says “has largely been missing from the experience of recordings since digital arrived.” OMA has a less expensive division called Fleetwood Sound, and Reichert calls its DeVille model, listed at around $15,600, “one of the best small speakers” he has ever heard.
There are real physical differences between this older technology and the audio devices you can find in a Best Buy. Cheap new stuff is likely powered by a clutch of transistors driving small diaphragms that move a lot. By comparison, the older horn designs are very good at throwing sound while barely moving, partly because the music is being amplified by something called a compression driver—a thin metal diaphragm agitated by a magnet. The supersensitive horn-loaded speakers are driven by low-wattage amplifiers outfitted with single-ended triode vacuum tubes, the oldest and simplest of their kind.
The idea here is not complex: a signal moves from the source—a phonograph or CD player, say—to an efficient speaker, and along the way it experiences the fewest possible augmentations, the least amount of stress. The word “excursion” refers to how much a diaphragm has to move in order to produce sound. Those small speakers you find in Best Buy? They experience excursions up to a quarter of an inch, a violent amount of back and forth. By contrast, the diaphragms of compression drivers found in horn speakers move only a few micrometers. The horn is the most ancient amplifier, a physical sound-thrower that can transport a large air mass. Small movements excite its narrow end and large movements come out its wide end.
“These big horn systems—they’re asleep,” Reichert tells me. “The system is barely operating. It’s adding energy in a relaxed and unstressed way.” The sound feels like a physical emancipation, the music suddenly rising up and walking toward you. It is not a coincidence that horn-loaded speakers are sometimes the size of people. Weiss’s loft is not a jazz café, but it is a kind of cathedral.
Unlike the tech bros burning through money both real and imagined, Weiss and the rest of the high-end audio cohort could at the very least drag their wares into the street and be of service, even though they are rarely thinking of the greater good. Gordon Gow of McIntosh Laboratory called this type of equipment “toys for insecure adults.” It’s not gear for the general population, and I would have left it alone if something hadn’t rearranged me. I had a feeling that the jazz kissa might be hovering around us.
The Imperia speakers made a sound that was wide and vivid and full of dirty weight, the breath of an organism. When the audio critic Herb Reichert hears this quality in good speakers, he calls it “believable corporeality,” which he says “has largely been missing from the experience of recordings since digital arrived.” OMA has a less expensive division called Fleetwood Sound, and Reichert calls its DeVille model, listed at around $15,600, “one of the best small speakers” he has ever heard.
There are real physical differences between this older technology and the audio devices you can find in a Best Buy. Cheap new stuff is likely powered by a clutch of transistors driving small diaphragms that move a lot. By comparison, the older horn designs are very good at throwing sound while barely moving, partly because the music is being amplified by something called a compression driver—a thin metal diaphragm agitated by a magnet. The supersensitive horn-loaded speakers are driven by low-wattage amplifiers outfitted with single-ended triode vacuum tubes, the oldest and simplest of their kind.
The idea here is not complex: a signal moves from the source—a phonograph or CD player, say—to an efficient speaker, and along the way it experiences the fewest possible augmentations, the least amount of stress. The word “excursion” refers to how much a diaphragm has to move in order to produce sound. Those small speakers you find in Best Buy? They experience excursions up to a quarter of an inch, a violent amount of back and forth. By contrast, the diaphragms of compression drivers found in horn speakers move only a few micrometers. The horn is the most ancient amplifier, a physical sound-thrower that can transport a large air mass. Small movements excite its narrow end and large movements come out its wide end.
“These big horn systems—they’re asleep,” Reichert tells me. “The system is barely operating. It’s adding energy in a relaxed and unstressed way.” The sound feels like a physical emancipation, the music suddenly rising up and walking toward you. It is not a coincidence that horn-loaded speakers are sometimes the size of people. Weiss’s loft is not a jazz café, but it is a kind of cathedral.
by Sasha Frere-Jones, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Adam Simpson. Source photograph of a jazz kissa in Okayama, Japan, taken by Katsumasa Kusunose and included in his book Jazz Kissa 2015–2019.
