A Kansas City Garage Reborn as XO, a Bar for Listening

What was once a place to hear machines breathe is now XO, a space where strangers fall silent together in the presence of music — part of a growing constellation of Midwestern listening rooms that are reshaping how communities gather around sound.

On Kansas City’s Westside, at 709 W. 17th Street, a squat brick box once housed Mr. Brook’s garage. From the 1950s through the early 2000s, Lawrence “Mr. Brook” Brooks worked there with the door rolled open, leaning into engines and diagnosing problems by sound — the knock of a piston, the slip of a belt, the cough of a carburetor. The space wasn’t large, barely big enough for a car and a bench, but for more than half a century it carried the daily music of machines being tuned back to life.

That same address now hums in a very different register. In 2024 the garage reopened as XO, a 35-seat listening bar where the engines are turntables, the fuel is vinyl, the ritual is letting an album play all the way through, and grooves extend for as long as engine metaphors. From the sidewalk it still looks modest, its face hidden behind a breeze-block screen, but step inside and the atmosphere tilts: the day’s noise drains away, the lights settle low, and the sound system takes over. On one recent visit the room was locked into sequence by the Meridian Brothers, then drawn deeper by Thievery Corporation and Maurice Fulton’s project Boof — records that filled the space with the same focus Brooks once brought to an idling motor, only now the listening is collective, reverent, and aimed at music.

XO opened as a sibling to esp, the Denver listening bar that helped establish the model in the Rockies, and much of its DNA comes from that first space. “A lot of what we’ve developed at esp over the last few years have translated well at XO,” says co-founder Jordan Hubner. “Holding the room in a way where guests’ voices are just below the music has always been a bit of a balancing act, especially for guests visiting for the first time.” esp runs XO’s bar program and hosts occasional KC pop-ups, but XO belongs to this city. The vinyl wall pulls from an initial dig in Albuquerque — “most of the classics on the shelves,” says co-founder Will Minter — then grows by twenty records a month, a back-and-forth between staff taste and what sings on their system.

Food and drink orbit the same philosophy: pared down, nothing extraneous. Highballs, natural wine, cider, beer. Konbini-style snacks scaled to a kitchen that barely exists. “I think there is a connection between providing simple, honest, well-crafted cocktails, and low-intervention wine to the honesty of how you hear a record on our system,” Hubner says. The idea is to serve without stealing attention, to keep the spotlight on the groove.

The gear locks it in place: a Garrard 401 with a Thomas Schick arm, an EM/IA amp feeding Altec Valencias and Almarro-powered Cornwalls. “The Garrard has been the workhorse and the most dependable piece for us,” says Minter. The Cornwalls, Hubner adds, filled the missing warmth. The system wraps the room, no dead spots, no corner left out.

Last week XO hosted DJ Adam Y for an evening of street soul, the rough-edged, DIY strain of UK R&B championed by small independent labels from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. It was the kind of night that tied the bar to its sister space in Denver, where the tradition of giving the booth to local heads was built in from the start.

“For the first year or so at esp, we featured weekly guest DJs,” Hubner says. “It’s a great way to share the space with local collectors, get the community involved, and give people an opportunity to meld their taste into the room.” esp has been extending that collaborative spirit beyond its own four walls — in May they partnered with In Sheep’s Clothing on a dedicated listening session for William Tyler’s Time Indefinite, linking Denver’s hi-fi bar directly with our own community of listeners.

XO isn’t alone in the Midwest. Chicago, of course, has Charis, Oklahoma City has The SoundBar, St. Louis has The Saturn Lounge, Minneapolis has Small Hours, and even northern Michigan boasts a spot called Malted Vinyl. Together they form an expanding constellation of Midwestern rooms where records are the main event, played with intention and heard without distraction. Still, XO feels distinctly its own: a Kansas City space that asks for quiet in order to prove that recorded music still has the power to pull strangers into a shared hush.