The monolithic speakers of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2 look like a cross between a gigantic honeycomb and the front of a “Jetsons” spaceship. The system, built by audiophile designer Devon Turnbull, sounds like nothing most people have ever heard before — you feel like you’re seated in the front row at an orchestra, or on a bar stool at a smokey jazz club, or inside Aphex Twin’s brain.
The 2,500-square-foot listening room on the seventh floor of the museum is just one part of the Art of Noise exhibit, which also includes a treasure trove of concert posters and vintage stereos (it opened in May and is slated to close this Sunday). The room is kept dark except for spotlights on the turntables and speakers, with the folding seats scattered on the ground. DJs play in either four-hour or seven-hour shifts that are intended to be nonperformative, with the talent billed as “operators,” who are instructed to take off their shoes (and reminded to wear clean socks). There are two turntables, but the system is designed without a crossfader, so there’s no way to smoothly transition between records, or beat-match like a DJ would in a club setting. One record ends, there’s a moment of silence, and then the next record begins, such that technique doesn’t distract from the pure sonic power of the music.
When I interviewed Turnbull, he spoke for about 20 minutes about the philosophy behind the system, which is based on high-efficiency speakers and low-power triode tube amps. He went on to describe multicell horns, Class D subwoofer amplifiers and how he had hauled transformers from Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district home in a suitcase. However, unless you breathe the rarified air of the audiophile sect, those words likely mean nothing to you — they certainly don’t to me, and I’m a professional DJ and music producer. But the bottom line is that the system has as few components as possible, each is absurdly high quality, and Turnbull said some took hundreds of hours to design.
“It’s unlike any other thing that I’ve experienced,” one DJ said. “I’ve played shows in stadiums, huge trestle stages, other hi-fi rooms. This was like a holy experience. It’s almost like the church of sound.”
Why does a speaker horn with 15 directional cells create more intense emotions than a pair of cheap earbuds? And in a broader sense, why does one collection of musical notes sound better than any other? What is music for, after all? This is what I like to call a DJ existential crisis.
When I asked Turnbull about this, he wasn’t surprised; he rattled off some facts about acoustic physics — how octaves in music are doubling in the frequency of sound waves, a cosmic coincidence that translates to goose bumps.
“Sound is just vibrations traveling through the air, and then when they hit our eardrum, we perceive them,” Turnbull said. “Our brain processes them initially as a way of forming a reactive response — a safety mechanism. Like, something dangerous is happening and we need to avoid it. Like a lot of our senses, they’re to help us navigate the world. But there are certain frequencies that give us a sensation of pleasure when the brain processes them.”
“If I had one wish,” another DJ said, “it would be that everyone once in their lifetime can get a record of theirs, a song, a cassette, just to be able to hear it on a system like that and just have it imprinted, tattooed in their heart.”
More here.
Here I is. I’d like to hear that rig. I LOVE high efficiency speakers, especially big horns. I’ve got a pair of ’77 Klipsch La Scala’s (internet picture, not mine) in my living room. Not a particularly large room, so they’re as big as the room will handle. Good recordings sound magnificent. They have presence similar to live music. You also hear all the details you’d hear on good headphones, except they’re speakers. Two downsides: 1. They’re unforgiving. Bad recordings get no sugarcoating, they just sound bad. Not a big deal to me, as I’m more music-lover than sound snob. 2. The initial spousal battle that rages when one brings home speakers this big.
Well those look sweet.
Smart not to show yours here, as it might give away the camouflage.
The closest thing to this I’ve heard is the sound system at the Memphis Listening Lab. AMAZING! It even makes The Subteens sound good.
$250,000! Cheap!
Agree that it sounds great.
The listening lab does sound great. I’ll take your word on how it makes the Subteens sound. Renfield, I’d have to get divorced to be able to bring those speakers in my house. Hmm….
Mrs. Renfield came around eventually. She couldn’t deny the good sound, and she even grew to like the cabinet design.
Before picking them up, I waited until she was in a highly distracted state to mention that I’d bought some pretty big speakers and mumbled that they were around 38″ tall. I got the desired “whatever, I’m busy” treatment. So a few days later as a friend and I lugged them inside and got “what the hell are those??!!,” I could say, “I told you exactly how big they are.” Naturally I had to endure futher denunciation, but I’ve been through much worse.
The hardest part was finding a clean pair. They still make them (in continuous production since 1963!), but they’re too expensive, and I like the older all-wood cabinets better. It took me several years to find a pair that wasn’t beaten up or badly refinished by a DIYer. I had to drive to Little Rock to pick them up.
I came to close to buying the next model up, the mighty Klipschorn (in continuous production since 1948!). They’re huge, but fit in a corner and have rear-firing woofers that turn your walls into extentions of the bass horns. Yes! But you need a space larger than my living room for them to really do their thing, so I passed on a clean old pair for a pretty good price.
So it’s probably a bad sign that the Klipsch site will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about those Klipschorns except the price, right?
Surprisingly, Amazon sells them. Only $16, 498 for the pair!
Damn, new La Scalas at $13k have almost doubled in price since I last checked back in ’09 when I bought mine. So even used La Scalas and K-horns in good shape might be prohibitively expensive, at least for me. The good side is that they’ve been making them so long that there are many out there. Deals must come up. Best situation is probably when someone inherits a home or is downsizing and needs the damn things out of the way quickly at any price.
When I was shopping around, I looked at a local pair of La Scalas that I ended up rejecting. The owner was selling them because he’d acquired some K-horns that someone had just put out on the curb in Collierville. Even if they weren’t working, parts are still available and aren’t that expensive. A cottage industry has sprung up around servicing them.
Other models such as Heresies, Fortes, and Cornwalls give you most of the sound for less $$ and size.