Bestec Audio and Nippon Rediffusion deliver Japan’s first Soka inWall inside SUPPOSE DESIGN OFFICE’s sensory-awakening space

TOKYO, JAPAN – QUARO opened in February 2026 on Cat Street, in the middle of Harajuku, with a concept that shapes the whole building rather than decorating it. The idea is filtration, and each of the four floors is given over to a stage of the process.

Alchemy is a private space where guests can experience a tailored coffee course. This is the original space, where green coffee beans undergo an “alchemy” into a refined cup through in-house roasting. Flow is a welcoming floor seamlessly connected to the energy of the street, where guests can casually enjoy coffee and pastries. Resonance is a music floor where sound, drinks, and space harmonise, inviting guests to relax and unwind. 

Edition is a creative floor that generates new experiences through collaborations with art and diverse brands.

The second floor, Resonance is where QUARO’s ambitions for atmosphere are highest. The Hiroshima and Tokyo practice SUPPOSE DESIGN OFFICE combined minimal elements—light and shadow, material textures, subtle scents, and sound to create a space that invites visitors to engage all their senses, beyond just the visual.  Every surface is a decision and there is nothing for a loudspeaker to hide behind. By day, vinyl-curated music plays over the counter. After dark, the DJ booth takes over. It is also the only floor at QUARO running a discreet, concert-grade L-Acoustics Soka system.

Anyone who has put a sound system into a room of that quality knows how the story usually ends, with the interior absorbing the compromise. Brackets appear, a box breaks a sightline, and a carefully composed wall acquires something it was never drawn with. But the brief for QUARO was a record bar that could hold a DJ set, and still look exactly as its designers had drawn it.

For the audio it turned to Nippon Rediffusion, a company that has been working on that problem for longer than most. Its roots run back to being the partner of the world’s first background music service, Rediffusion Music, launched in the United Kingdom in 1929; and its work today runs from licensed background music through to fully branded audio-visual installations. It took on the audio project for Quaro, and worked in partnership with L-Acoustics Certified Provider Bestec Audio for Resonance.

“There were two important requirements in the brief for Resonance,” says Hiromu Itoh, audio systems designer at Nippon Rediffusion. “We had to deliver a sound system that could cater to both a relaxed daytime coffee service and evening performances, and we had to keep it out of sight so it didn’t hinder the room’s sophisticated look.”

Soka inWall Answers a Brief That Ruled Out Visible Loudspeakers

Those two requirements pull against each other. A record bar needs real output; an interior of this quality needs the system to stay out of the design altogether. Soka inWall is built for precisely that case. It’s a colinear source designed to be recessed into a standard wall construction, delivering line source performance from a wall that gives no sign of a loudspeaker.

“Typically, music bars feature massive, prominent speakers, but that wasn’t an option here,” Itoh adds. “And if you want a wall-embedded speaker that rivals concert-grade setups in both power and sound quality, the L-Acoustics Soka inWall was truly the only option. I was so pleased to be given the opportunity to work with it here. I’d been waiting for this moment since seeing the Soka inWall at a trade show last year.”

Bestec Audio reports that Resonance is the first Soka inWall installation in Japan.

Soundvision Places Soka inWall Straight from the Architects’ Drawings

Placement was settled the way the rest of the room was settled, between the designers and the audio team, and it is the point in the job where the two disciplines had to agree. Kagetsu Sen, spatial designer at SUPPOSE DESIGN OFFICE, passed the architectural drawings to Itoh, who imported them into L-Acoustics Soundvision and tested each candidate position against the real geometry of the room, mapping coverage and level across the counter, the elevator entrance and the window seating. The positions that worked acoustically turned out to be positions the design could keep.

Resonance runs on two L-Acoustics Soka inWall, one recessed behind the staff counter and the second by the elevator entrance. An L-Acoustics SB10r inWall, an ultra-shallow wall-recessed subwoofer, sits below the second enclosure and extends the system’s low frequency response to 25 Hz. Soka inWall runs full range on its own while the SB10r adds weight to the low end, especially for the evening DJ sets.

Soka inWall’s 140-degree horizontal directivity, held to 26 degrees in the vertical, suits the deep, narrow floor plan at Resonance. It is wide enough to cover the full width of the room from two positions, and controlled enough vertically to keep energy on the guests rather than on the ceiling and the glass. The same system serves the room as it transitions from a quiet daytime playlist through to an evening DJ set.

Soka inWall Holds the Room from Coffee Service to DJ Set

“We’re thrilled with the result and truly blown away by the power of the Soka inWall,” says Itoh. “The interior of QUARO is sophisticated and refined, and adding high-fidelity sound transformed it into an inviting cafe and performance space.”

For QUARO, the proof is in the hour when the room changes character. QUARO’s manager, Ayato Sasaki, points to it. “The second floor is designed for guests to linger and savour both coffee and music,” says Sasaki. “And watching the atmosphere shift as the sun sets, delivered by a system nobody in the room can see, is exactly the sort of elegance we were looking for.”

For more information on QUARO, please visit https://quaro.jp/. More information on Nippon Rediffusion can be found at www.nrlmusic.co.jp/en, and on Bestec Audio at www.bestecaudio.com.

Please visit L-Acoustics at www.l-acoustics.com