Paul Noble was working as a radio producer and sound engineer when his frequent travels to Tokyo sparked the idea for a change of career.

“In Japan, there’s an amazing tradition of listening bars, where they have a deep, beautiful, reverential approach to listening to music,” he says. “It’s nothing to do with club culture. It could be a tiny bar, with six seats in it, and you’ll just sit and listen to music, usually in silence.

“It’s such a gorgeous, meaningful way to re-engage with music in an era where the listening experience – and all of the love and care that goes into recording, writing, recording, mixing, mastering an album – has been devalued.”

The eventual result was Spiritland, a cafe and bar in London’s King’s Cross in which visitors can meet, chat and buy a coffee or cocktail, but where the music is central, as evidenced by the large and beautifully designed speakers – “a one-of-one super-high-end sound system” – dominating one wall of the low-lit, brick and wood-panelled space.

It opened a decade ago, and where Spiritland and other pioneers including Dalston’s Brilliant Corners led, others are now following, with growing numbers of similarly music-led venues opening in London and farther afield.

Referred to variously as listening, hi-fi or audiophile bars, each interprets the Japanese concept differently – though none (to date) routinely bans customers from talking while music is playing. (“We’re not the fun police,” says Noble. “We’re not going to tell people to stop talking and listen to the music.”)

Some operate as restaurants, others transition to dancing spaces as the music is turned up later in the day. What unites them is a serious speaker system and a reverential approach to the listening experience it delivers.

An exceptional audio setup is “everything”, says Nam Tran, who opened Ōdiobā, an “artisan coffee shop by day, listening bar by night”, in Stockport in March. “The main focus that we put towards the public are our speakers, because the speakers are the crown jewels, the showpiece.” In Ōdiobā’s case, that means vintage 1970s Tannoys that have been lovingly handbuilt for the space by Tran and a maker in Germany.

You don’t need to be a hi-fi obsessive to recognise that listening to a compressed digital file through earbuds is not the best way to appreciate great music, Tran says. “What we want to do is make people aware that you can listen to the music you love in much better surroundings.”

The rise in listening bars comes as late-night clubbing undergoes a “precipitous” decline in Britain and around the world, attributed to the effects of rising fuel costs, the hangover of the pandemic and, in the UK, Brexit. The fact that Britain has lost more than half its nightclubs in a decade may be fuelling demand for a different kind of night out, says Ria Hylton, a staff writer at DJ magazine who has written about the phenomenon.

“The expectation of what makes [a] quality night out now is very different to what it was 20 years ago, and that might be in part to do with the fact that things are getting more expensive,” says Hylton. “So if you are going to go spend money, why not spend it on a more bespoke experience that goes beyond a few pints and a few shots?”

Stuart Glenn is a co-founder of All My Friends in Hackney Wick, east London, which serves food from late afternoon but transitions into a listening and dancing space as the volume goes up throughout the evening. The venue was developed by the club collective the Cause after they noticed, he says, that “some of our audience had grown up and stopped coming. Some didn’t want to go out on the same frequency, they just wanted a social place to hang out that had good music, but was a bit of a lighter experience.”

“It’s just like a social for our audience to come and listen to good music on a really nice sound system, enjoy good drinks and quality food and it’s a lot more relaxed.”

Hylton says: “When I go out now for work, I’m always looking for somewhere to be able to just sit and listen to quality music on a quality system, ideally played on vinyl, which does something for the space, for sure, in terms of the warmth and the detail. People are willing to spend money on quality experiences more now, and as clubs get more expensive to go to, why not do something like this?”