A dedicated hifi listening room is a space set up around one activity: playing music on equipment good enough to actually reward your attention, in a room quiet enough to give it that attention. No multitasking, no background noise, no competing purpose for the space. Just the system and the record.

If you've never been to a listening room, walking in for the first time can feel a little unfamiliar. There's no stage, no bar crowd, no background music you're meant to talk over. You sit down, the lights are low, and pretty quickly you realize the record playing is the whole point of the evening. Here's what an actual night at B-Side looks like, so you know what you're walking into.

Kissa is short for kissaten, the Japanese word for coffee shop. Attach "jazz" to it and you get something more specific: a cafe built around recorded music instead of conversation. The idea took shape in Japan in the late 1920s, when a handful of cafe owners started installing phonographs and treating records as the main event rather than background noise.