Devon Turnbull's Ojas Listening Room

He builds six-figure speakers by hand in Brooklyn for the world's most obsessive listeners. His own room is the proof of concept.

The Scene

Devon Turnbull doesn't have a showroom. He has a workshop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where massive horn loudspeakers take shape from raw birch plywood, hand-wound transformers, and vintage drivers sourced from decades-old Western Electric and Altec Lansing inventory. Every cabinet is built by hand. Every amplifier is assembled on-site. The waiting list is measured in years.

Under the name Ojas, Turnbull has become the most sought-after speaker builder in the world — not through advertising or retail, but through word of mouth among a specific clientele: producers, designers, and collectors who've heard his systems and can't go back to anything else. His personal listening room, situated within the workshop itself, is both laboratory and temple — the place where every design gets its final audition before leaving for a client's home.

The room is a study in intentional simplicity. Custom horn-loaded cabinets — some standing over five feet tall — face a single listening position. A Sun Audio tube amplifier provides the watts. The source is typically a turntable feeding a hand-built preamplifier. There's nothing extraneous. The room exists for one purpose: to disappear and let the music through.

The Gear

Turnbull's own system centers on his custom Ojas horn loudspeakers — massive, horn-loaded enclosures built from Baltic birch plywood with vintage JBL 328C compression drivers and Western Electric / Altec Lansing components sourced from the golden age of cinema sound. The horns are designed to be as efficient as possible, requiring only a few watts of amplification to fill a room.

Powering the system is a Sun Audio tube amplifier kit — a Japanese single-ended triode design that Turnbull assembles and modifies himself. Sun Audio has been building these kits since the 1990s, and they've become a cult favorite among the horn-speaker community for their simplicity and transparency. Turnbull pairs this with his own Ojas preamplifier and Ojas turntable, both handmade in the workshop.

The signal chain is deliberately short. Turnbull's philosophy — documented extensively in Stereophile's "Hi-Fi as Art" feature and Hypebeast profiles — is that every component between the groove and your ear is an opportunity for distortion. Fewer parts, better parts, assembled by hand. The transformers in his amplifiers are wound on-site. The speaker cabinets are jointed, not screwed.

I'm not trying to make the best speaker. I'm trying to make the most honest one.— Devon Turnbull, Stereophile

Why It Matters

Turnbull matters because he's created something that shouldn't exist in 2026: a one-person speaker company with a client list that includes Mark Ronson, Tyler, the Creator, Don Was (president of Blue Note Records), the late Virgil Abloh, and Nigo. The New York Times, Stereophile, and Hypebeast have all profiled his work. A pair of his speakers appeared as a permanent art installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

What makes Ojas remarkable — and relevant to anyone reading this site — is that Turnbull's designs are inspired by gear you can actually find. His horn-loading principles descend from Klipsch, JBL, and Altec Lansing designs of the 1940s–60s. His amplifier philosophy mirrors the single-ended triode movement that Sun Audio popularized in Japan. If you can't commission an Ojas system, you can build toward the same sonic philosophy with vintage Klipsch Heritage speakers, a Sun Audio kit amp, and a quality turntable — all of which are available on the secondary market.

In a world of mass-produced wireless speakers and algorithmic playlists, Turnbull's workshop is a reminder that the most advanced audio technology might be the simplest.

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