Outside a former kitchen on an east London street called, perhaps fittingly, Club Row, there’s a chalkboard advertising “COFFEE, EGGS & BLOODY GOOD SPEAKERS”. You might pass it by thinking it was just another bit of café-culture whimsy, but this is more than an eatery and lounge with challenging music in the background. This is Sonos Studio, which provides an extraordinary set of sonic experiences in a cafe and lounge space that is designed to be as acoustically perfect as a high-end recording studio.

This is far from the only place to have opened in recent times where the quality of the loudspeakers is a selling point. The monumental Spiritland soundsystem has brought billionaire-level hi-fi to London restaurant-bars and will move to a dedicated home in spring. Tucked away among the hustle and grot of the east London district of Dalston is Brilliant Corners, an initially unassuming little bar owned by brothers Amit and Aneesh Patel, where jazz, disco and electronic music can be heard over the kind of huge Klipschorn speakers that make sound enthusiasts and club historians go weak at the knees. For a couple of months last autumn, avant-garde music magazine the Wire set up a listening room in collaboration with Vitsoe furniture: an oasis of obscure Japanese music, groovy art books, Dieter Rams chairs and shelves, and beautiful loudspeakers.

Meanwhile, touring venues and festivals round the world is the gorgeous Despacio soundsystem conceived and run by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem with the 2ManyDJs duo, and the Bowers & Wilkins Dome created by the speaker company “with the aim of exposing a broad range of music lovers to the experience of great sound”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Played Twice sessions at Brilliant Corners in Dalston, east London Photograph: Brilliant Corners

Before all of these came Classic Album Sundays, the session run by Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy where fans gather to listen to a record in its entirety, played from original vinyl over speakers and amps that cost more than most of their homes. Public hi-fi sound has, without question, become A Thing. In some cases, this boom in high-end audio experiences has been unashamedly driven by lifestyle salesmanship. The Wire’s publisher, Tony Herrington, is upfront: “It’s about marketing, partly,” he says, “plus a chance to be part of the London Design festival. Vitsoe asked us to be part of their installation to show off how nice their shelves look laden with stuff, we had a relationship with them as they’d advertised with us, and we couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.” And obviously while Sonos Studio and Bowers & Wilkins Dome exist to engage with music fans and create experiences, the idea of getting people to go out and upgrade their home stereo kit is a vital part of their raison d’etre.

But just as often there’s a strong sense of a personal mission about it. Spiritland’s Paul Noble has the air of an evangelist when he talks about a “revelatory trip” to Japan a few years ago that showed him how very good quality sound could be achieved in a public venue. “I don’t just mean the high-end places in Tokyo: this also extends to tiny bars in towns way out of the main urban areas. I’d find a wall of original jazz issues on vinyl, EMT turntables, valve amps and JBL speakers – and no mixer or limiter. Just a record collector carefully playing the music they loved, and a few people sitting there digging it.”

Amit Patel says Brilliant Corners was created “because my brother and I are obsessive music-lovers, and we wanted somewhere to share that where it would sound its very best”. The bar is a no-frills affair except where it matters: quality but affordable wines, and moon-globe lanterns to set off the plain decor – and those speakers.

“I think everyone should be able to have good things,” says Patel. “It’s not elitist, it’s just the desire people from all backgrounds have to get dressed up at the weekend and hear great music.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Originator … David Mancuso, the godfather of the modern club scene, and an audiophile obsessive. Photograph: Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

Even Bowers & Wilkins’s Danny Haikin – although initially as on-message about the technical qualities of the speakers as a brand director should be – quickly becomes much more lyrical, talking about the “sonic wisdom” of the B&W engineers and the joy of watching 2,000 dancing people “all experiencing an epiphany” about musical clarity. There’s something about the sharing of hi-fi experience that is miles away from the usual dry, technically-obsessed, overgrown boys’ club of home “audiophiles”: something that seems to remind people of the pleasure principle in music, technology and socialising.

There’s nothing new about this, though. Subcultures from reggae to disco have long valued and even fetishised their soundsystems: witness the ICA exhibition Radical Disco: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy, 1965-1975 (which closes on 10 January).

A vital point of reference for almost everyone I speak to in the new wave of hi-fi sound is David Mancuso’s Loft parties – the cosmopolitan all-night New York gatherings that began in 1970 and which created disco and modern club culture, held by Mancuso in his own apartment set up with Klipschorn speakers.

Murphy has a longstanding working relationship with Mancuso and puts on Loft parties in London with the Lucky Cloud soundsystem. Like Patel, she is quick to push aside a sense that connoisseurship of sound is elitist: “Quite the opposite, in fact,” she says. “What David did from the beginning of The Loft, and what we try and do, has a strong egalitarian drive. We don’t want this technology to just be for the 1%, once you hear music in all its glory, it’s an experience you want to share as widely as you can.”

Patel also underlines the importance of east London’s Plastic People club, which closed at the start of 2015 after 20 years of dancers immersed in the output of owner Ade Fakile’s legendary soundsystem in near total darkness. “There were no distractions, people would appreciate even stuff they wouldn’t normally listen to, whether that’s jazz or African records or whatever, on an instant level. And sharing that experience can bring together a really diverse lot of people.”

That, he says, is what he wants from Brilliant Corners: “I want it to be more like a family party where you’ll meet all sorts and hear all sorts: not a club where you have to be part of a scene, and DJs have to pump it out to keep the energy up.”

Sonos’s Tom Panton also namechecks Plastic People as a crucial incubator. “I think when it closed, people realised that they’d taken it for granted,” he says, “and the instant nostalgia that generated made people start to really understand what’s lacking in standard club spaces that are kitted out with sound-systems built for brute power, and done up with all that bare brickwork and concrete, which might look great but is actually about the worst possible surface you could have acoustically. I think there’s definitely a growing appetite now for somewhere you can come closer to music that’s not that club blasting experience but isn’t your iPhone headphones either. There’s kind of a renegotiation going on about where and how we listen.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The holy grail … a Klipschorn corner speaker

Noble enthusiastically echoes this: “People just coming in for a drink often can’t believe what they’re hearing – and that they’re hearing music you’d never normally hear ‘out’. We’ve had someone in tears when a DJ played One Day I’ll Fly Away by Randy Crawford. One of our regular DJs played Abbey Road from start to finish on the original vinyl: so simple, but such a pleasure to hear on a great system.” Meanwhile, Classic Album Sundays plays everything from Jay Z to Art Of Noise to Ride albums, while, alongside their DJ sets from new-generation fidelity obsessives such as Four Tet and Floating Points, Brilliant Corners do regular play-throughs of classic jazz albums followed by a reinterpretation by a live band.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sonos Studio listening room Photograph: Edward Park

Both Sonos Studio and Spiritland will run workshops, artists’ residencies and more. But it is all driven by the thing that is at the heart of what they offer: listening to music in a way you can’t at home. These spaces offer people with cheap separates or computer speakers the chance to hear music differently, and if you doubt that hearing music in this way is different, consider what Alexis Petridis recently wrote in this paper about hearing a favourite old LP by Ride through the best equipment: “It sounded astonishing, weirdly tangible, like the music was happening in a space just in front of me, like it was in 3D. You could walk around it, you could reach out and touch it. I was genuinely overwhelmed.”

The ownership of high-end audio is likely to remain the pursuit of the few. Either those who have £500,000 to put together a system, then the spare cash to build a special room for it. Or those for whom devoting all their spare time and spare cash to continual upgrades is their hobby, their lifestyle – the people who listen not to music they like, but to music that showcases their system. It’s prohibitively expensive and complicated for most. But, finally, you don’t have to be a millionaire to hear music in the highest fidelity.