Centretown's New Living Room Runs on Vinyl, Not Algorithms
Matías Muñoz has spent nearly two decades building rooms for Ottawa's music community. FONO, his hi-fi lounge on Bronson Avenue, is his answer to a city — and a generation — worn out by playlists it never chose.
August 26, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Ottawa, Ontario · Business · 7 min read read
A Room Built Backward From the Speakers
Most bars decide on a drink menu first and worry about the room later. FONO worked the other way around. Inside its Centretown building — a space that still holds a basement pile of 1800s headstones from monument-maker George Brown and Sons — the room itself was engineered before anything else: solid wood walls that colour the light amber, quadratic diffuser panels mounted as sculpture, cylindrical acoustic absorbers wrapped in linen, and paper-globe pendant lamps in the style Isamu Noguchi made iconic.
The bar is tessellated white ceramic, built to read like an izakaya counter. It is, at once, mid-century and Japanese, calibrated and lived-in. When a record goes on the turntable, the oak lends a low-end warmth you feel in your chest while the diffusers quietly kill the flutter echo that ruins most rooms built for sound. Someone chose the record. Someone calibrated the speakers. Someone thought, very hard, about how the room should feel — and it shows.
During the day, FONO runs on its own kind of ritual: pour-over coffee from a Moccamaster using beans from Lulo Coffee, an Ottawa roaster, served in a terracotta mug across a room still waiting to come alive with sound that night.
The Man Who Kept Building Ottawa's Music Rooms
FONO is the latest in a long line of rooms built by Matías Muñoz, who moved to Ottawa from London, Ontario in 2008 and settled into Centretown almost immediately. “This block specifically feels like home,” he has said. “I've always been a Centretown person.”
For nine years, Muñoz and Eric Scharf ran Ottawa Showbox, a music blog that reviewed local albums and profiled artists playing to rooms of thirty people with the same reverence a stadium act might get. In 2013, Muñoz acquired a brain injury in an accident — and kept the blog running for eight more years anyway, because it was a way to stay inside a community that had come to matter to him.
After Showbox came Cinqhole, a not-for-profit venue in Hintonburg co-founded with Anthony Cardozo and Scharf that opened in September 2019 and closed during the pandemic. Then Green Room, a rehearsal studio on Elm Street. People have started calling Muñoz a community builder; the label visibly makes him uncomfortable. Each project, in his telling, has simply been “a room of some kind.” FONO is the room he's built with the most patience — and the most obvious care — yet.
An Answer to Algorithmic Fatigue
FONO calls itself Centretown's living room, and the framing is deliberate. A hi-fi listening lounge is built around a specific counter-cultural bet: that after years of algorithmically generated playlists optimized to keep you half-listening while you scroll, a growing number of people — especially younger listeners who grew up entirely inside streaming — want the opposite experience. A record someone chose on purpose. A room designed so the sound is worth sitting still for. A night where the point is the listening, not the background noise.
That bet is showing up in cities across the world as "listening bar" culture spreads from Tokyo's kissa tradition into North American nightlife, but Ottawa's music scene hadn't had a dedicated version of it until FONO opened. CTV News called it fittingly "a little cozier" for a city whose music venues have taken real losses in recent years.
For an audience raised on infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendation, deliberately choosing to sit in a room and listen to a record someone else picked, with no shuffle button, is a genuinely countercultural night out — which is exactly why it works.
More Than a Bar: Weddings, Corporate Nights, and Private Dinners
FONO's daytime coffee counter and nighttime listening room share the building with a full events operation. The space books private dinners, corporate functions, parties, and weddings, with FONO's team helping plan the room, amenities, and format around each occasion. It is a practical answer to the economics every independent venue faces: a beautifully engineered listening room only pays for itself if it can also host a Tuesday-night product launch or a Saturday wedding reception.
Music bookings run through a separate channel entirely — DJs, live sets, and concerts are handled directly by Muñoz's team, who note they work primarily with a small group of preferred promoters given the volume of requests they receive. It is a small, telling detail: even with real demand, FONO is staying deliberate about what goes on to its stage, the same way it was deliberate about which paper lamp went on its ceiling.
Key takeaways
- FONO is a hi-fi listening lounge and event space at 473 Bronson Avenue in Ottawa's Centretown neighbourhood.
- Its acoustically engineered room combines solid wood construction, custom diffuser panels, linen-wrapped absorbers, and Noguchi-style paper lamps.
- Founder Matías Muñoz previously built Ottawa Showbox, the Cinqhole venue, and Green Room Rehearsal Studios over nearly two decades in Ottawa's music scene.
- FONO's vinyl-led listening format is positioned as a direct response to algorithmic streaming fatigue.
- The space runs a daytime coffee counter using Lulo Coffee alongside its nighttime listening programming.
- FONO also books private dinners, corporate events, parties, and weddings through a dedicated events team.
Frequently asked questions
- What is FONO in Ottawa?
- FONO is a hi-fi listening lounge, coffee bar, and event space in Ottawa's Centretown neighbourhood, built around an acoustically engineered room and vinyl-led programming.
- Where is FONO located?
- FONO is located at 473 Bronson Avenue in Ottawa, Ontario, in the city's Centretown neighbourhood.
- What makes a 'hi-fi' listening lounge different from a regular bar?
- A hi-fi listening lounge is designed around sound quality first: professionally calibrated speakers, acoustic treatment, and curated vinyl programming, so listening — not background noise — is the point of the visit.
- Who founded FONO and what's their background?
- FONO was founded by Matías Muñoz, a longtime Ottawa music community organizer behind Ottawa Showbox, the Cinqhole venue, and Green Room Rehearsal Studios.
- Can I book FONO for a private event?
- Yes. FONO hosts private dinners, corporate events, parties, and weddings, and its team helps plan the space and amenities for each booking.
- Does FONO serve coffee during the day?
- Yes. FONO runs a daytime coffee counter using Lulo Coffee, an Ottawa roaster, brewed on a Moccamaster and served in terracotta mugs.
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