St Kilda’s Premium Sound Grows Upstairs With Dedicated Listening Rooms

Something’s changed upstairs at Premium Sound

If you’ve walked past our St Kilda Rd showroom before, you’ll know the layout. Same floor, same familiar rows of speakers and turntables. That’s changed.

We’ve opened up the space upstairs for the first time, and it’s now home to a series of dedicated listening rooms, each one built around a specific brand. It’s still the same shopfront you know at 70-76 St Kilda Rd, just with a lot more happening above your head than there used to be.

If you’ve bought from us before, this is your invitation to come back and see what we’ve built. It’s a different way of spending time with the gear you already love, and the gear you haven’t heard yet.

From browsing to actually hearing

Our old floor worked well for years. You could walk in, see most of our range in one lap, and get a feel for a system. But feeling a system and really hearing one are different things.

Speakers change character depending on what’s playing next to them, how far apart they’re spaced, and what’s bouncing off the walls around them. On an open floor, with several brands running at once, it’s hard to isolate what you’re actually listening to. A dedicated room lets you focus on one system at a time, set up the way it would sound in an actual living room, not a shopfront.

That’s the thinking behind the move upstairs. It’s less about adding space and more about giving each brand the conditions to be heard properly, and giving you the time to sit with it.

Each brand gets its own room

Head upstairs, and you’ll have your pick of rooms. Most are set up around a single brand, though one room is dedicated to showing off the best pairings of speakers and amps across brands. Unlike some showrooms, there is no shared walls of competing speakers, no ambient noise from three systems at once. Just room after room built to let you actually sit with what you’re hearing.

Klipsch and Onkyo share a room, and it might be the most interesting one on the floor. Rather than isolating brands, this room is built around configurations, letting you hear Klipsch and Onkyo alongside Advance Paris amplifiers, Rega turntables and pre-amps. It’s the closest thing upstairs to a proper listening laboratory: swap a pairing, hear the difference, understand what each piece is actually contributing. More brands will likely be joining this room over time. Sonance, James by Sonance and Blaze share a dedicated room built around invisible, whole-home audio, the kind of system you install once and forget is even there. Valerion, one of our newer additions, finally gets a room of its own – an immersive home cinema built around an incredible 4K projector. And finally, Bang & Olufsen has a space entirely to itself, which we’ll get to shortly.

The rooms are deliberately sized the way a lounge room is sized, so what you hear upstairs is close to what you’d hear at home.

A proper home for Bang & Olufsen

We’ve carried Bang & Olufsen for years, but it always shared floor space with everything else. Upstairs, it finally gets a room of its own.

The centrepiece is the Beosound Theatre, B&O’s flagship home theatre system, built around 12 drivers and 800W of amplification, and designed to work in spaces from a small den up to a large lounge room. Seeing it in a proper home theatre set up, with Beolab 28’s, Beolab 19 and even in-ceiling Celestial speakers makes a real difference. You get to watch and listen the way it’s meant to be heard, and the way the artist or filmmaker intended it to be seen and heard.

If you’ve bought B&O from us before, this is the upgrade worth coming back for.

The room count is still growing

The upstairs floor isn’t finished. We built it with a few empty rooms on purpose, because Onkyo, Klipsch, Valerion, Sonance, James by Sonance, Blaze, ATC and Advance Paris are just the start of the brand list, not the whole thing.

We’re already in talks about who fills the next rooms. We’d like to keep you in suspense, so we won’t name names yet! But if you’ve been coming to us for Focal, Naim, Devialet or Bang & Olufsen gear over the years, expect to see more of what you love get its own space too, one room at a time.

Settle in and actually listen

Picture this: you walk upstairs and the lighting drops, soft and warm instead of bright and clinical.

Each room has proper seating, not a stool by the door. You pick an album, someone plays it through, and you listen for a while.

There’s carpet underfoot and soft furnishing on the walls, so nothing hard-edged bounces the sound around. Calm, but not dead.

Nobody’s rushing you to the next brand. That’s the whole point.

Drop by and hear it in person

We’d love to have you back through the doors at 70-76 St Kilda Rd. There’s a lot more to see and hear now.

Pop in any day Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm (closed Sundays), or call ahead on (03) 9534 2673 if you’d like a room to yourself when you visit. No pressure to buy anything, no rush through the rooms. Just come sit down, put on something you love, and hear what’s changed.

We’re at stkilda@premiumsound.com.au too, if a quick question is easier than a call.