According to Google Gemini “a kissa (short for kissaten) is a traditional Japanese coffee or tea house, which often refers specifically to a music-focused listening café like a jazz kissa”. The first audio cafe for audiophiles in the Klang Valley was the Vintage Kissa Audio Cafe which opened in Kota Damansara (see https://www.av2day.com/2023/03/first-audio-cafe-for-audiophiles-in-klang-valley/) three years ago.
Vintage Kissa Audio Cafe has shifted to Ground Floor, JUMPA, Sungei Wang Plaza in Kuala Lumpur, and it had its soft opening today.
It now occupies a much larger retail space which is filled chock-a-block with all sorts of old cassettes, LPs, CDs, old speakers, amplifiers, radios, turntables, collectibles, antiques, ceramics, yixing clay teapots, pu-erh tea cakes and even a Singer sewing machine.
The star attraction is the pair of huge Altec Lansing H1505 horn speakers from the 1950s in the dedicated listening room. There are two other rooms in the audio cafe — the main one serves coffee, food, cakes and gelato while the second room features turntables connected to headphone amps and headphones. You can drink coffee and listen to LPs in this room.
There are also a vinyl and a CD jukebox which are still functional. CK Yap bought them from Malaysian owners and repaired them. There is also a His Master’s Voice gramophone, which is also still functional, and owner of the cafe CK Yap will readily play a 78 rpm record for you. “I have to use one needle for each record played. After playing, the needle is thrown away,” he said.
CK Yap said he decided to move to Sungei Wang Plaza because the outlet in Kota Damansara was not so visible since it was on the first floor of a shoplot and there were problems with finding parking bays there. “Sungei Wang Plaza is a better location and there are a lot of walk-ins,” he said.
