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.”
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