Prick Up Your Ears: New Venue Shyboy Bringing Hi-Fi to Downtown

Early next year, a listening experience unlike any other in North Texas will open its doors. 

Shyboy, tucked away in former bank vaults beneath the Drakestone Apartments, 1313 Main St. in downtown Dallas, will be a first-of-its-kind hi-fi bar. (The Drakestone was formerly known as the Davis Building, prior to the Headington Companies’ renovation in 2017.)

The 3,000-square-foot space is modeled, in part, after the sort of venues first popularized in Japan immediately following World War II. Shyboy is intended to provide a thoughtfully conceived, carefully assembled and finely calibrated space in which to, figuratively and literally, lose yourself in the music. 

“Hi-fi is a pursuit,” said Jonathan Merla, vice president of marketing for the Headington Companies, in a recent conversation. “It’s an endeavor that takes a lot of research and contacting all sorts of different people, and then, obviously, it takes a lot of investment to do it right. It’s not an inexpensive thing. That, coupled with, I think, now people are wanting a different listening experience.”

Entering Shyboy will undoubtedly provide that, even for those who have respectable analog listening setups at home. 

The equipment and designers namechecked here may not mean much to the layperson, but even a cursory glance at the specs and behind-the-scenes personnel enlisted for Shyboy indicates Merla very much means what he says insofar as “a lot of investment.” 

A pair of state-of-the-art OJAS sound systems, designed by the New York-based artist and audiophile Devon Turnbull, will anchor Shyboy’s two listening rooms — a main space and a smaller area, informally dubbed the “blue room” — with McIntosh amplifiers and customized Neve preamps augmenting Turnbull’s pieces. (For context, a single, Turnbull-designed bookshelf speaker costs $6,000. Suffice to say, the speakers located inside Shyboy are considerably larger.) 

Renowned acoustician Ethan Bourdeau, whose work in listening spaces includes a recent exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has acoustically tuned the entirety of Shyboy, further refining Turnbull’s work and helping ensure a singular listening environment. 

“A lot of details have gone into this space so that it performs acoustically,” Merla said. “All of it is to remove any sort of distractions for the listener, so the listener can just walk in, hear some good music that they’ve never heard before and enjoy it.” 

Indeed, for all of its gearhead cred, Merla is emphatic about the venue’s egalitarian nature. Shyboy will be open Wednesdays through Sundays and will have a capacity of just under 300 (cannily ensuring both comfort and the possibility of FOMO). The company plans to offer most access most nights free of a cover charge. 

Furthering its promise of accessibility, each space will feature a bar offering a menu comprising what Merla calls “democratically priced” signature highballs and other cocktails, as well as soft-serve ice cream.

“We wanted to make sure that a 23-year-old could come get a $13 cocktail that doesn’t take that long to wait for it to be made,” Merla said. “They can focus on dancing or listening. That’s really been our north star at this place. How we can use our resources to remove all the things that you encounter in listening spaces … the things that distract you from connecting to the music.”

A Wide Range of Sounds

What will those filing into Shyboy’s acoustically treated temples of sonic exploration hear? Merla said the genres on offer will be expansive, ranging from house and Latin rarities to Japanese city pop and classic jazz. 

Helping curate the DJs and selectors passing through Shyboy will be its music director JT Donaldson, a well-regarded DJ in his own right, as well as label owner and talent buyer, who helped co-found the acclaimed Josey Records before parting ways with the label and retailer in September.

“Why we called it Shyboy, we started to kind of decouple it from the nerdy audiophile and make it more accessible for people to wrap their heads around,” Merla said. “People think hi-fi is very serious, and it’s not that. We’re definitely going to have a lot of listening sessions, but we’re also bringing [DJs like] Theo Parrish and Eli Escobar and Derrick Carter and all these people to come play from all over the world, so [people] can come and let loose, too.”

Shyboy’s interiors, designed by the international architecture and interior design firm 5G Studio Collective, embrace the rawness of its basic elements, leaning more towards a brutalist nature, an homage, perhaps, to I.M. Pei’s endangered City Hall just a few blocks away.

The roots of the communal, close-listening environment are more of a mid-century modern vibe, exemplified by the “jazz kissa” style of cafes found throughout Japan, which encourage focused listening to high-fidelity (and typically, though not exclusively, jazz) records through vintage audio equipment.

“I just loved the idea of the women and the men who own kissas in Japan,” Merla said. “They’re so dedicated to this thing, and it’s just this one person. It’s the bar that they built. It is the loudspeaker system that they built. It is the record collection that they spent their entire life collecting. There’s just something so poetic to that, and such a deep connection. … I thought that was super inspiring. We took a lot of that into Shyboy.”

Shyboy arrives at a moment when, more so than ever before, the analog presentation of music has become a focal point for North Texas nightlife. While Shyboy will be the first, explicitly marketed-as-such hi-fi bar in the area, there are other notable rooms — Boogie’s, Ladylove Lounge or the Headington Companies-owned Midnight Rambler — where vinyl reigns supreme. 

To that end, in anticipation of what Shyboy will bring to downtown Dallas, Merla announced that a new, vinyl-focused boutique will soon open at the Joule, called Record Dogo, overseen by Connor Fields. The boutique will specialize in international rarities, first pressings and imported dance singles. 

“People want little record shops,” Merla said. “They want curation, and they want super niche [selections]. That’s, I think, what people really dig.” 

Shyboy is targeting a mid-January opening — timelines, particularly in the world of nightlife and entertainment-oriented businesses, are nothing if not flexible — but Merla and his collaborators within the Headington Companies and beyond are eager to bring a new perspective to a night out for the denizens of Dallas.

“I’m really excited about how we’re programming the space and who we’re attracting because of its very rare nature in America — it’s not just Dallas,” Merla said. “No one’s really building anything like this yet. I found out there aren’t many people crazy enough to do it, because it takes a lot of work.”