Devon Turnbull, fashion’s go-to sound guy

Step into the USM Modular Furniture showroom on Greene Street in New York City’s Soho, head towards a doorway in the space’s back corner, past the colourful shelving and storage configurations the Swiss brand is known for, and you will find yourself in a discrete sonic oasis. This tiny room, a shoes-off space that seats about eight, is dominated by a sound system built by Devon Turnbull. The system’s design is minimal, totemic and imposing, but its sound is gentle, nuanced and expansive.

Turnbull, 44, is the founder of Ojas, a high-fidelity audio project that designs artisanal speakers, amplifiers, and components including tonearms and cartridges for turntables. The gear is coveted by individuals and businesses who consider sound as crucial in creating a welcoming space as lighting or furniture, and are willing to spend as much as five figures to cultivate the right atmosphere.

Turnbull has been quietly building his own hi-fi set-ups for more than two decades. But Ojas has really taken flight during the past few years, finding purchase within fashion — a world Turnbull knows well. In the early 2000s, he co-founded the streetwear brand Nom de Guerre, a New York-based label that was significant in laying the groundwork for the workwear-meets-military surplus-meets-skater vibe that continues to colour menswear from luxury to high street.

Now, he and his small team release small batches of products such as bookshelf speakers, with prices starting at $5,500, build custom sound systems for Supreme’s boutiques, the streetwear brand that was acquired by VF Corp for $2.1bn in 2020, and tackle increasingly bespoke commissions. Every room in Nine Orchard, one of New York’s hottest new hotel properties, boasts at least one Ojas speaker hard-wired into its walls.

Last weekend, speakers from Ojas were in service at an event in New York organised by Joopiter, the auction house founded in 2022 by Pharrell Williams. The event was in support of an auction of Kenzo artistic director Nigo’s personal effects, and naturally Nigo stopped by the space at USM for a visit.

An Ojas set-up appeals on a few levels. There’s the look, reminiscent of the less-is-more modernist refinement of Dieter Rams’ work for Braun. There’s also the associations with Turnbull’s influential clients — many were introduced to his work through the late Virgil Abloh, a friend who commissioned a piece from Turnbull for his 2019 Figures of Speech career retrospective exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Others have perhaps come across the custom systems he installed in the home of fashion photographer Tyler Mitchell, or experienced the sound at a party thrown by Prada.

“My client base is, I’m sure, a big part of the visibility of my practice,” says Turnbull. “I initially wanted to shy away from my background in fashion because I was afraid of people in the high-end audio world dismissing me as just being fashionable. I don’t doubt that there are plenty of people that this drives crazy, but it’s not by design. I didn’t set out to create a brand and attract people by working with X, Y and Z — that’s just my peer group.”

And then of course there’s the sound, which is best understood through experience — hence spaces such as the USM outpost. Open since September, it is the latest in a series of public installations, including at New York City’s Lisson Gallery in the summer of 2022 and at its London outpost in Marylebone this past summer. Turnbull and his team would devise a system to suit the space and programme it with a series of listening sessions featuring legendary recordings from the Blue Note Records catalogue such as John Coltrane’s Blue Train and new, unreleased works by contemporary jazz artists including Alabaster DePlume.

The popularity of these events has taken Turnbull slightly by surprise. On the last weekend of the London installation, crowds queued down the block.

“A lot of the music that I play is very soothing and intentionally very different from the music listening experience that you typically have in a café, or bar or nightclub,” he says. “I want people to come in and feel able to decompress and relax, but when you have 500 people cycling through a room that only fits like 20 or 30 people, the context changes.”

An Ojas system is characterised by its components, the most visibly distinct of which are the tube amplifiers he favours — technology that, as Turnbull notes, hasn’t changed much since the 1950s. Aficionados suggest that tube amplification generates a warmer tone, delicate and defined even at room-rattling volumes.

“When I was working in fashion, I spent a lot of time in Japan, and this type of audio comes from Japan,” he says. “It’s based on an amplifier circuit called a single-ended triode — the Japanese didn’t invent this type of circuit, but they invented applying it to home audio.”

Turnbull will happily launch into a technical breakdown of what distinguishes one of his designs from what he describes as the more “analytical” sound produced by systems built using contemporary technology, but he insists his preference comes down to the environment and the emotional experience of giving a piece of music one’s undivided attention.

“I’d been seduced by infinite free music, and at that time, in the early 2000s, the quality was so bad that it really didn’t matter what you were listening to it on,” Turnbull says. “My relationship to music had changed. When I was younger, I had a stereo system set up in my bedroom, and there was a lot of music that I just sat in the dark and listened to. That was the most emotional and attractive thing about collecting music, and I realised that I couldn’t do that anymore, and that it was entirely because of the format and the equipment. I wanted to get back to that.”

Turnbull was able to rekindle that youthful spark by getting deeply hands-on, connecting with music through the laborious, devotional exercise of building and configuring playback systems to his own exacting specifications. “People like me consider their system building to be part of a ceremonial practice,” he says.

To this end, there is an educational component to Turnbull’s project. In the early days of Covid-19 lockdowns he released a flat-packed, build-it-yourself bookshelf speaker kit priced at more than $2,000, and offered instruction and technical support to his customers via video calls. In addition to the listening room, USM has carved out space in its basement that Turnbull is using to conduct similar workshops. In October, he led an inaugural group of six through an exercise in building a Sun Audio tube amplifier — a $3,000 amp imported from Japan that Turnbull considers “very iconic”.

“The idea is that this is a community-building space for people who are interested in audio, spanning all the way from DIY to very high-end,” says Turnbull. “There aren’t many places where that community has the opportunity to even realise itself as a community — it can be a very reclusive hobby.” Turnbull likens the USM nook to a skate shop, where hi-fi heads can come not only to buy the parts they need to advance their own home-build adventures, but to socialise with like-minded enthusiasts, and, of course, listen to some records.

The kind of gear that Turnbull creates with Ojas is intrinsically difficult to scale. It’s mostly hand-built, requiring a command of niche techniques and the parts required to build a system in this style are in short supply, even for those with the deepest of pockets.

The USM space will be open indefinitely, and more gallery shows will follow. Even if an afternoon spent in front of an Ojas system doesn’t convert a visitor into a hi-fi gearhead, it might encourage them to become a more active listener — a meditative relation to music that can be practised by anyone, regardless of what kind of equipment they have. As Turnbull puts it: “The most important thing, when it comes to listening to music, is just listening to music.”

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