Music and Recording Features

The genesis of Art Of Noise
"Music has always been a passion of mine," Becker told me weeks before I journeyed to San Francisco. "I'm motivated by music that can be transformative. That led me to want to provide a transformative listening space. I am also a curator of architecture and design. Pulling out the connection between design and music was a natural evolution of my interests."

Close to 18 years ago, when Becker began working at the museum, he learned of its "incredible" collection of nearly 500 psychedelic rock posters that was gifted to SFMOMA by Jim Chanin in the mid-1990s. "We'd never shown them all at once," he said. "So, this was an opportunity to present them in an immersive, near-psychedelic manner and then take the narrative and run with it so that we could tell as expansive a story as possible.

"There are over 800 objects in the show. They tell cross-generational stories and are very connected and personal in a way that's different from the other work that you see at a museum. Maybe what you encounter is something you owned, or you recognize from your grandmother's house or because it's embedded in our collective experience. Take, for example, an iPod. You may have never owned one, but [seeing it in context], you certainly can gain an understanding of what it was and how it transformed how we listen to music."

Becker was beginning to develop Art Of Noise in 2019 when he and Turnbull connected during one of Turnbull's gallery exhibits in New York. They immediately began to figure out how to create a purpose-built listening space for SFMOMA.

Ideal or not, the listening room had some 46 sound-absorbing panels, 12 strategically placed diffusers, long risers/bleachers filled with insulated material that act as giant bass traps, and other acoustic treatment on the ceiling. Even if none of that trapped all the errant bass all the time, the room was certainly more controlled than many a retail showroom.

"People come into a museum with an expectation to encounter visual art," Becker said. "Art Of Noise wonderfully subverts those expectations by presenting audio art. Acoustic art transfixes because it caters to another sense entirely. And, of course, the system itself is beautiful. It's a rarefied experience to hear this type of hi-fi in an era where most of us are conditioned to listen on our Alexas, AirPods, or whatever.

"This is essentially a performance piece that taps into the infinite, vast sum of creative musical output. Not everybody has an opportunity to listen to a system that is intentionally scaled this way. It's a transformative experience for many people."

Devon's story
Starting with Herb Reichert, other Stereophile writers have discussed Turnbull and his acoustic odyssey at length. It's particularly significant that, at the start of our onsite chat, he noted that he did not start out as an artist with a desire to transform a stereo system into conceptual art. Rather, as a New Yorker who loved music but never saw playing keyboard as a viable career for himself, he studied audio engineering at the Art Institute of Seattle, moved back to NYC, and got into recording and pro audio because he wanted to be around music and learn from musicians.

He soon got involved in the street art and graffiti communities. "I started screen printing T-shirts in my apartment, and a store asked me to put some on consignment," Turnbull said. "They called me a few days later and said this guy—the number one music artist that I wanted to try to find a way to work with—asked if I could go over to his apartment and maybe loan him some clothes for a show he was doing the next day. That's when I realized that creativity was much more fluid that I'd thought, and perhaps I could do visual art even though I had no training in it."

Very quickly, Turnbull and "a bunch of partners" started a menswear brand that he described as "between men's casual streetwear fashion and high fashion." When he also began working for Stephen Gan, the creative director of Visionaire fashion magazine, he found himself compelled to stop deejaying and audio work.

Nonetheless, the fascination with audio, which began when he heard his father's MartinLogan speakers, continued to grow. His passion led him to John DeVore's high-sensitivity speakers, as well as to low-power single-ended triode amplifiers. When his creative studio moved to Tokyo, he was exposed to the "Japanese perspective, ... a more serious form of DIY that included boutique parts, high-end transformers and capacitors, equipment by Ken Shindo and other famous designers, and specialty audio circuits." As he began to build equipment for himself and his influential friends in the world of art and fashion, he found himself aspiring to a particular sound.

For a decade or so, Turnbull worked on one or two projects a year as a side business. Then, in his mid-30s, he assembled a "pretty elaborate" Japanese-style listening room in his home. His system for SFMOMA represents a new chapter in the journey he's pursued over two decades.

"I'm primarily a student of the Altec/Western Electric/Japanese school," he said. "My perspective is similar to Art Dudley's. But the SFMOMA system uses TAD 1601 bass drivers and 1" and 2" compression drivers. They sound and act very differently than the Altec drivers Art favored. The left and right speakers also reference Shozo Kinoshita's Rey Audio (footnote 6) RM7 monitors (above, footnote 7), while the center unit contains 31.5" Fostex subwoofers.

"The museum system is a big departure from other work, especially because it has a digital signal processor. While the front-end uses super-minimalist circuitry, we have a two-channel in/eight-channel out digital signal processor that we use for parametric EQ, time alignment, and the active crossover. There are four 1200W custom class-D amplifiers for the bass, and single-ended 211 amps for the mids that are designed by me and Steve Berger."

HiFi Listening Room Dream No.2 is the second of a series of unique systems that Turnbull has assembled for specific listening environments. "People may misinterpret it as my dream system, or something like that," he said. "They may equate it with the best sound system you can possibly have. I'm definitely not saying that. It's more about the story of my voyage as a craftsman, experimenting in a huge room that's not easy to fill with a hi-fi system.

"To be fully honest, I'm gonna push for smaller rooms for these kinds of exhibitions from now on. There's an intimacy that's a bit lost with a system in a room so big that it's more about the size of a venue than anything else. While I usually build home systems with very minimalist circuitry that are based almost purely on feeling, this system was calibrated with measuring equipment and test tones. It sounds much more studiolike than my home systems.

It's also nothing like the systems I build for clubs. You can't take an exceedingly detailed and dynamic home system and put it into a nightclub with 50 drunk people yelling at each other with an ambient noise level of 85dB."

Turnbull's commentary on generational preferences is especially insightful. "I can tell you with absolute certainty that no matter how I tune a system, older people, particularly people that have strong opinions about audio, will say there's too much bass, and younger people will say there's not enough bass," he declared. "There was a bass revolution sometime in the 1990s where commercial sound in nightclubs changed completely. Today, most sound way too bassy and boomy. So, my sound is a balance of those things."

Before I started getting into hi-fi, I had this very definite moment when I got sucked into this low-resolution MP3 thing. I was trading music with people and built a big music library of not-very-good–sounding files. I was trying to connect with Miles and Coltrane and Beethoven—some of the best music ever made—and my system was not taking me there. That's what led me down my hi-fi path. I realized that I could have really powerful listening experiences if could listen the right way.

"Ultimately, I just want people to melt into the musical experience. I want them to experience something that they were totally not expecting and just say 'I enjoyed that.'"

Final thoughts
Months after visiting SFMOMA, several musical experiences remain vivid. One involved a visiting deejay's segue from Joni Mitchell's "The Jungle Line" from The Hissing of Summer Lawns to Gentle Giant's far livelier "Pantagruel's Nativity" from the aptly titled album Acquiring the Taste, and then, most incongruously, to Negativland's oft-hilarious Escape From Noise. Who expected to encounter warnings about "The Commie People," followed by a lecture on endless prosperity, in a space intended for contemplation?

Turnbull took a very different tack. From Tim Maia's "Rational Culture" and a journey through 2001: A Space Odyssey, we proceeded to Arvo Pärt's rarefied tintinnabulum followed by great music from Lou Reed and John Cale, then Bill Frisell. Turning up the volume, Turnbull dared break the reverence by speaking to us as he progressed back in time from Part One of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" to organist Simon Preston's rendition of J.S. Bach's iconic Toccata & Fugue in D Major.

For reasons known only to the Divine, every aspect of the system, including the all-important bass, came together on that glorious music. Some of us could not help but applaud or cheer. Then, in another act of divine inspiration, came multiple tracks from Balmorhea. But it was the combination of Bach and a much-needed boost to music-appropriate levels that finally took the system over the top. If music is your chosen vehicle for contemplation, be sure to do it at the right volume level.

Footnote 7: See reyaudio.com/large-e.html.