The SoundBar OKC — A Living Room on Broadway
Upstairs on Broadway Avenue, Oklahoma City's premier vinyl lounge folds a listening room, a record shop and a hi-fi dealer into one space — and wants to be your new living room.
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: The SoundBar OKC
Address: 712B N Broadway Ave, Oklahoma City, OK 73102, USA
Website: thesoundbarokc.com
Instagram: @thesoundbarokc
The "B" in the address matters. The SoundBar sits upstairs, above ZamZam Mediterranean Grill on North Broadway — and that small detail tells you something about how listening culture takes root in American cities. Not on the ground floor with the foot traffic, but one flight up, where the rent is kinder and the room can be shaped around sound rather than passers-by. Tokyo learned this decades ago; its best listening rooms hide up narrow staircases and behind unmarked doors. Oklahoma City, it turns out, arrived at the same architecture.
The pitch here is disarmingly domestic. The SoundBar describes itself as your new living room and creative hangout — a space equally comfortable for a little alone-time or an evening with friends, built around a sound system they call pure ear candy. That living-room framing is worth taking seriously. Where some listening bars reach for the temple or the vault, this room reaches for the sofa — music to recharge your emotions and imagination, heard properly, with a drink in hand and no ceremony required.
The drinks are paired to the records with a light touch: wine with vintage jazz, cocktails with classical, beer with bass and drums, by the bar's own reckoning. Food comes up the stairs from ZamZam below — Mediterranean, generous, unfussy. Hours run Wednesday and Thursday from 5pm to 10pm, Friday and Saturday from 5pm to midnight, with Sundays closed and Mondays and Tuesdays given over to private events, corporate happy hours and fundraisers.
Then there's the part that makes The SoundBar genuinely unusual. Through a partnership with local record shop Monkey Feet Music, the lounge holds around 12,000 albums — new and pre-owned — that you can browse and buy on the spot, with a further 35,000-strong inventory back at the shop, and a standing promise to source what neither location holds. The same partnership puts turntables, amps, receivers, CD players and speakers — contemporary and vintage, across a range of budgets — on sale in the room. Most listening bars keep commerce politely outside the door. The SoundBar closes the loop instead: you hear a record on a serious system, and you can walk out with the record and the means to play it properly at home. The living room upstairs seeds a thousand living rooms across the city.
That's the quiet significance of a place like this. Oklahoma City is not trading on a famous scene or a tourist trail. A vinyl lounge thriving here, above a Mediterranean grill on Broadway Avenue, is the listening movement proving itself in the American interior — one comfortable chair, one well-poured glass, one record sleeve under someone's arm at closing time.
If you're in OKC, take the stairs. Order what suits the record. Stay longer than you meant to.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, read the daily, or explore more venues.
