Inside one of the coolest places to listen to music in Vegas

It’s happy hour, and the horns flow from the speakers as smoothly as the bourbon being poured at the bar, both intended to warm the blood. It’s an inviting sound, a jazzy purr, and though the volume is modest — maybe a 5 out of 10 — it surrounds us on all sides, crisp and precise, so much so that we can practically hear the trumpeter’s fingers pistoning into his instrument as he plays.

“Do you know the place you are?” singer Gregory Porter asks over a walking upright bass line and twinkling keys in the song “French African Queen,” currently soundtracking the evening.

Fair question.

If we’d been brought here blindfolded, our location only revealed once we’d pressed past the velvet curtain at the door, we’d think we were in the wood-paneled, ’70s-style rec room of a deep-pocketed audiophile with an even deeper understanding of high-end sound systems.

The gear here is both vintage — dig the Technics reel-to-reel that looks as if it dates to the Nixon administration — and so extravagantly cutting edge that the cables used to connect the brand-new McIntosh hi-fi stereo rig cost $15,000 alone. (For the uninitiated, McIntosh is to high-end stereo equipment what Rolls-Royce is to high-end automobiles.)

“You usually you find this in gazillionaires’ homes,” observes Natalie Young, noted Vegas chef and boundlessly enthusiastic sonic connoisseur. “Somebody like me, if I came into a place like this and I saw that, it would almost make me cry.”

There are no tears in Young’s eyes on a recent weekday afternoon, just a palpable sense of pride, as she leads us on a tour of Echo Taste & Sound, a new downtown bar/listening lounge with a throwback vibe.

An acclaimed Vegas culinary scene veteran, Young has launched numerous restaurants around town and is perhaps best known for her popular breakfast and lunch spot Eat, which recently closed.

But her latest venture is her most personal one — literally, some of the stereo equipment here comes from her bedroom.

“This is the closest thing to who I am, on the outside,” Young explains. “It’s me expressing, sharing with the world who I am. I’ve been thinking about this for 20 years.”

Before Echo opened to the public, Young invited over her longtime friend and fellow gearhead Rob Alahn, former co-program director at the Downtown Cocktail Room.

“We’d sit there, like in the center of the floor, and just play tunes, and I remember smiling so hard,” recalls Alahn, who’d later be hired as Echo’s music director. “When she let me walk through that door and sit down, I was just like, ‘Yeah, I’m not getting up.’

“I’m not leaving, because there’s nothing like it.”

Big sound, big investment

She looks around the room and sees herself.

“This is me,” Young says with a wave of the hand, clad in a floral shirt and tan hat, looking as tastefully bohemian as her surroundings. “It’s like my own private, ultimate living room. … If you came over to my house, it literally looks like this.”

We’re sitting in what Young colloquially calls the “Green Couch Lounge,” a chill spot near the center of the room that faces a vintage sound system topped by a handmade rotary mixer from France and flanked by a pair of Technics SL-1200 turntables that she acquired from the Downtown Cocktail Room and had refurbished.

By turns passionate and professorial, Young lovingly describes the gear that she’s been collecting for years.

“That’s a 9090 Sansui receiver,” she says of the stereo’s large, silver engine. “It’s late ’70s/early ’80s, super sought after. It was a big deal back in that time.”

The system’s Klipsch speakers are powered by McIntosh MC75 tube amps that are no longer manufactured.

“Took me about five years to find those,” Young notes. “I waited and waited and waited.”

She gestures toward a large black subwoofer.

“There’s only 12 of them in the world,” she says. “That’s No. 10.”

“It’s no joke,” Young says of the expense required to bring Echo to life. “These power amps, they go all the way around the restaurant. That’s eight grand each.

“Look,” she continues, “eight grand, eight grand, eight grand, eight grand. People don’t know the investment I put into this.”

Said investment can be as measured in emotions as much as dollars.

It all began with what Young thought would be an ending: her retirement.

A few years back, she was contemplating hanging up her chef’s apron, though she had qualms about her future. She expressed these concerns to her mentor, renowned interior designer Roger Thomas, and his partner over breakfast one day.

“I was like, ‘I’m supposed to retire, but I’m not financially in the position to retire,’ ” she recalls. “I was all stressed out. What do I do? And (Thomas) looked at me, and his partner looked at me, and they said, ‘What are you talking about?’

“Roger’s like, ‘I did my best work between 60 and 70,’ ” she continues. “I was like, ‘What?’ A light bulb went off. I went home, and this popped out.”

Not done with food

Young was visiting Denver when she happened upon a listening bar, ESP HiFi.

She didn’t even know such a thing existed — and she was mesmerized.

“I walked in and I go, ‘This is brilliant,’ ” Young recalls. “I was like, ‘I’m going to do my version of this in Las Vegas.’ ”

She pitched the concept to Rhiannon Andersen, owner of trade show exhibit house Steelhead Productions, who dug the idea and then brought in her husband, entrepreneur Tom McAllister, to partner with Young.

“What I want to see is somebody manifest their thing out into the world,” McAllister explains. “It’s not about making money. We didn’t talk about finances or any of that.

“She had a vision,” he continues of Young. “I never had, like, a big master plan. It was more like, I’m following my heart. I thought the idea was cool, but I had no idea it would be this awesome.”

As the two were scouting potential locations for their new business, Young got a call from the owners of The Colorado, who wanted her to open an Eat location in the building.

She had other ideas.

“I was trying to get away from food,” Young explains. “I kind of just wanted to have a listening lounge where you drank tea and sat in the corner and read a book and listen to a record.

“That was my initial concept, and that kind of blossomed into this,” she continues, alluding to Echo’s menu of craft cocktails and small bites, which range from caviar truffle chips to tomato toast, fried oysters to grilled Wagyu beef skewers, as well as a Sunday brunch. “I was like, ‘OK, the universe isn’t done with me and food.’ ”

The vinyl boom

“It’s like somebody committing to smoke a cigar.”

Young is talking about playing records, spinning a whole album side at a time, letting the music take hold, giving yourself to it.

“It’s a commitment to sit down, listen,” she explains. “Go slow, enjoy. It makes you slow down.”

Sure, you can always get up and move the needle to the next track, but that’s not what listening to an album is really all about: The point is to luxuriate in the music.

That’s a large part of what Echo is about. In a way, it’s a sign of the times: In an era in which most music is consumed via various streaming platforms and curated playlists that hopscotch from one artist to the next, there’s been a corresponding boom in sales of the exact opposite of digital music: LPs.

According to the 2024 year-end report from the Recording Industry Association of America, revenues from vinyl records grew 7 percent to $1.4 billion, the 18th consecutive year of growth, accounting for nearly three-fourths of physical format revenues.

Since 2016, sales have surged over 300 percent.

Such explosive gains hardly seem coincidental in the age of Spotify.

For plenty of music aficionados, there’s a joy in digging through vinyl crates, scanning album covers, spending hours in the record store immersed in the thrill of discovery, adding a physical, participatory dimension to their fandom.

It’s something tangible in an our increasingly intangible, digital world.

Young’s seen it all firsthand.

Young recruited her friend and Moondog Records owner Clint McKean to open a pop-up vinyl shop in a back corner of Echo, which brims with LPs ranging from Prince to AC/DC, Ry Cooder to Guns N’ Roses.

Business has been brisk.

“We sell a (ton) of records out of there,” Young notes. “He’s crushing it. People get four or five records. It’s like, who would have thunk?”

Alahn, for one.

“I think this community clearly has a lot of people with turntables at home, because the music’s walking out the door,” he says. “The vibe for anyone who walks through that room is to really, really, really wrap their ears around music in a way that I just don’t think the frenetic pace of our lives today allows us to do.”

Familiar tunes; fresh vibes

He nods to a sign hanging near the bar before reciting its message.

“‘Analog connections in a digital world,’” McAllister notes, verbalizing Echo’s mission statement. “I feel like this is something people need, connecting with each other. I mean, the music’s a big part of it, but it’s the way it’s presented.”

The idea is set a mood and sustain it, meaning the volume is moderate, keeping the pristine sonics a focal point, but not overwhelming the room.

“I still think that you can have a conversation there,” Alahn says, “but the the delivery of the sound is so warm that, even when it’s not loud, you’re hearing this detail, you’re hearing a level of fidelity that really allows us to stretch out at a low volume and introduce listeners to music that they’re very familiar with, but just haven’t heard it presented that way.”

The sounds vary, with DJs curating themed nights on the weekend — Funk Fridays, Jazz Saturdays, Soul Sundays.

The emphasis is on approachability, a mix of songs you love and songs you don’t know you love — yet.

“We’re not trying to alienate; we’re really trying to introduce and embrace,” Alahn says. “You know this song, but have you heard it like this?”

Unless you’ve got a six-figure budget for your home stereo, you most likely haven’t. For Young, Echo marks the culmination of a lifetime of collecting gear.

She has so much McIntosh product here, in fact, the company’s reps invited her and McAllister to their House of Sound audio showcase in New York City.

“They say there’s nobody in the country with this much McIntosh equipment in one space,” Young beams.

She recalls the day a semitruck showed up with all the new hi-fi treasures.

“I almost threw up when I saw the equipment on the floor over there,” she acknowledges. “And then I was kind of embarrassed, because I thought, ‘Is this, like, too much, over the top?’ ”

“That passed real quick,” she adds with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘This (expletive) is cool.’ ”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.