Backyard Coffee and Jazz in Kyoto

Turntable on a speaker - I thought that was not advised.

Why though? Because vibrations from a speaker can cause the turntable to move and move the arm or cause the needle to move.

In a jazz cafe, I assume the music plays low most of the time and so it probably doesn't matter much.

Depends how well the turntable is decoupled from its plinth. Think in terms of a lumped systems model with a mass on a spring being driven by (probably lower frequency) vibrations from the speakers.

"Now that I think about it, there was nothing in this shop that would tell you it isn’t still, say, 1960."

I'd go for 1980s based on the amplifier, turntable and speakers. It would be a radiogram, probably valve based, in actual 1960s. Nice though.

The motion of the speaker feeds signal back to the needle/input device. It matters even more in Jazz/syncopated music. The needle tracks with a force of only 1.5 grams or so, and any motion is greatly amplified. Also if you listen to jazz with the volume low you are doing it wrong. Do you link the volume was low in the club when Sun Ra was recording?

But besides that, those speakers are placed terribly for stereo imaging. Even tucked in the cubby, why place them with the drivers together rather than apart? And those speakers appear to be dreadful anyway. A single 12" driver in a vented / untuned baffle with no midrange or tweeter elements?

So this is definitely set up for aesthetic, not sound quality.

Feedback

I'm going to venture to guess the pair of subwoofers cabinets on their side are being used as a table and aren't otherwise connected. The only amplifier in the photos doesn't have nearly enough power to drive them and it appears to be connected to a small pair of bookshelf speakers above it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44358442

(There could be another amplifier somewhere out of view.)

I've got Genelec studio monitors in my kitchen. I care very much about sound. I would never set foot in your anechoic, soffit mounted cafe blasting jazz at 100dB.

That's a complete, total waste of studio monitors. Monitors are for nearfield positioned listening. Sound great when you are in the (small) sweet spot, but generic and flat off axis, which you will be most of the time in a workspace like a kitchen. And a kitchen is a terrible place to seriously listen to music, with all of the hard tile surfaces and tinny sheet metal appliances reverberating. You may care very much about sound, but you don't know very much about sound. If you did, and you wanted good sound while working in the kitchen, you'd be wearing some nice open back headphones, not some fairly cheap, very small monitors.

Speaking as someone that professionally played vinyl for around 5 years back in the 90s, here's my tip:

If you sum the stereo channels into mono then feeback present but inverted on each channel is cancelled out and the problem goes away like magic.

This seems to be lost knowledge but it's how old school sound systems[1] were able to have their turntables basically on top of a collection of speakers without feedback.

Many mixers back in the day, from people like Pioneer, used to have a mono/stereo switch for this purpose.

It's very easy to demonstrate this by placing a stylus on a stopped record, then tapping the record surface directly

The speakers are right next to each other so it's not like you're loosing stereo image.

1. I'm talking old school Jamaican and UK Sound Systems here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_system_(Jamaican)