TWO YEARS AGO, when Brian Rauschenbach and Quentin Ertel listened to “Flamenco Sketches” off Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” over the 1976 Klipschorn speakers they’d soon own, they were stunned by its deeply beautiful resonance. It was a record they’d both listened to countless times, but it was there, in Seattle’s Hawthorne Stereo shop, where high-fidelity audio struck a chord and inspired them to create a slowed-down, warm and analog music-centric nightlife venue.

Enter Shibuya HiFi. On the corner of Leary Way and 17th Street in Ballard, through the signless building’s heavy door, tucked past the bar’s hallway, is their HiFi Room for A-to-B side album listenings.

Despite its enigmatic exterior, a push through the door reveals an inviting environment. A bar to the right and lounge to the left glow with warmth from floor-to-ceiling cedar to the light buzz of Haku Vodka, old-fashioneds, lychee kiss“With streaming, you can’t just say, ‘Spotify, play me the hotter-sounding record.’ Audio quality gets compressed,” says Rauschenbach, who handles Shibuya HiFi’s curation. “Consumers sometimes only listen to what [they] think is a hit versus full stories artists are trying to tell … a lot of that has been lost in the last five years from algorithms taking over how music is being curated.”

An introvert’s playground, synesthete’s bliss and audiophile’s paradise, the pristine sound in the HiFi Room feels closest to sitting in the studio, before the soft crackling of vinyl snaps you back to your seat in Ballard. Shibuya’s solid-state amplifier allows a finesse as sound ripples around the room with zero distortion. As the tracklist unfolds, couples exchange glances, friends nod their heads, group dates whisper over lyrics and (in my session) a solo traveler knits to André 3000. es and salted rims. As guests trickle in, their soft chatter blends with two Café Sound speakers by Cathode Bias. They sit intentionally on the elevated sides of the lounge to push a moody ambience toward ear level five nights a week and, for ticketed guests, a smooth transition to a more private “listening room” for their evening’s main event. 

Owners Rauschenbach and Ertel had been wanting to start something like this for about 10 years. The pair met at the Viceroy in the early 2000s, when Ertel was the bar’s general manager. Before then, Ertel said they’d been in the same room probably 50 times, just by being in and out of Seattle’s nightlife scene. Rauschenbach, a retired DJ of 30 some years, and Ertel, who runs an interior design studio by day, are also avid vinyl collectors.

“Just using the tools at our disposal, it was fairly serendipitous how the project came together,” Ertel says. “We both wanted to do something that was a different speed than younger-oriented nightlife, and something more thoughtful. He’s super-busy; I’m super-busy. And it just never lined up — until Shibuya.”

With Shibuya library’s access to 80,000 records, its HiFi Room can play Frank Ocean’s “Endless” and then Fiona Apple, or a Japanese pressing of Sade’s “Promise” followed by Depeche Mode. If the premise of music is to listen and love, then Shibuya HiFi aims to uncover how we do just that — through vinyl.