Live concert venues and nightclubs still stud city centres, and music pours out of phone and computer speakers, but public spaces where one can simply sit and listen to a record have become rare to non-existent – until now.

On Friday in Berlin, the artist Wolfgang Tillmans will open a "playback room" in his gallery, Between Bridges. It's designed to do two things – to allow listeners to hear a record on a top-of-the-range stereo, and to give pop music the same love and reverence that galleries give to visual art.

"Some records are just perfect artworks, but you just cannot go anywhere to listen to the way the musicians heard it at the mastering stage," said Tillmans, who won the Turner prize in 2000. "While you can play them on your stereo or iPhone there is never a space dedicated to them and you can never listen in studio quality."

Concerned that the gallery environment shouldn't "sterilise" the music, Tillmans has created a cosy space with dim lighting, armchairs and two Bowers & Wilkins speakers.

Much like an art exhibition, the playback room will be devoted to one artist at a time – the first being Colourbox, the 80s indie act whose pioneering use of sampling put them in music's vanguard, and whose collaboration with fellow band AR Kane resulted in a No 1 hit – Pump Up the Volume by M/A/R/R/S.

"I've never tired of Colourbox in 25 years," Tillmans said. "They wouldn't have called themselves post-modern but it was an incredible freedom they embodied – to collide all these different influences. They're the perfect band for a project like this because they never played live."

The volume in the gallery will not be deafening, and having done some research on sound quality, Tillmans decided that the 16 tracks he has compiled will be played on CD: "This is not a vinyl fetish". An adjacent room will display the actual mastertapes, Colourbox's records, which viewers can handle, and a list of the sounds they sampled.

Tillmans said the experience of hearing the music on a top-end stereo "tickles nerves that are not usually touched … it's mind-blowing when you hear things you've never heard before in a record."

Yet his aim is not simply to delight audio geeks. "In my life music functions on a par with art – it evokes similar feelings and understanding of the world," said the techno and pop fan whose early pictures depicted his friends raving in nightclubs in the early 90s. "I don't feel that the complexity and quality of a record is represented in the way that artistic thought is represented."

Tillmans said he hoped that other arts institutions would follow suit and open their own listening rooms; that galleries would open themselves up to music in the way they embraced his photographs.

"Some people would say why would you put pictures from a nightclub in a gallery, but I thought these were important moments. They can be fleeting but also a profound and fundamental human experience, both at the same time. The best pop is on the one hand light, but on another it encapsulates the whole world."

• Colourbox, music of the group (1982-87) by Wolfgang Tillmans is at the Between Bridges gallery in Berlin from 13 September until 25 October 2014.