“I never try to convince anyone of anything,” replied Devon Turnbull to an Instagram message I sent him. “I just want to share with people who have the same interests as me.” I asked him how he manages to convince people that listening to high quality audio is worth it. But it seems that’s the least of his worries. In summer 2022 and 2023, Turnbull exhibited his hand built hi-fi setup at the Lisson Gallery in New York and London and both of these events were hugely popular – with over 700 people visiting on some days. There were no brand partnerships and there was little publicity from the gallery to the point that many of us were left wondering how the whole thing even worked – did you have to pay? Was it ticketed? When was it open? – struggling to wrap our heads around the simplicity of it: a spacious room in a gallery where you could drop in whenever you pleased and listen to music through some very big speakers. A DIY labour-of-love that, rather than keeping it for himself, Turnbull chose to share with everyone.

Turnbull’s love of all things audio has a similar charm to it as a kid collecting luxury toy cars – only slightly more niche. Since 2021, he has been taking photos of listening rooms featured in rare Japanese music magazines, translating the articles using Google and uploading any favourites to his Instagram account @_listening_room. One magazine that appears more than most is MJ (FKA as Musen to Jikken) and inside its first few pages you’ll find a feature dedicated to home listening rooms.

These listening rooms are like an audiophile’s equivalent to MTV Cribs – the stuff of dreams. The audio equipment is prohibitively expensive, not to mention it requires a home big enough to house them. But there is one owner that Turnbull shines a light on who has a modest and more relatable story. “Yoshinori san started young, buying what he could afford with the money he earned as a paperboy,” explains Turnbull before then quoting Yoshinori who says that “everyone will be happy,” if they can listen to music “with gratitude and a big heart.” Yoshinori compares this practice to Mayahana Buddhism, which is different from conventional Buddhism in that it believes anyone can achieve enlightenment in their lifetime through knowledge and meditation.

Mindfulness and meditation is something the HiFi Listening Room Dream no.1 experience encourages. When I visited the one in London, everyone left their shoes at the door and tiptoed into the room where at one end was a small collection of plushy seats set up on a dais facing Turnbull’s striking and monolithic hi-fi. Besides the speakers, there was little to distract you from the music which, for my sitting, a punter decided would be John Coltrane’s Blue Train. Once the music started, you could close your eyes and not only pick out every individual instrument with ease, but even place them around the room: the drums and double bass were in the back right corner, the sax was closer to me, just off to the left, and the keys danced somewhere in the middle of the room. It had the intimacy of a live show, only better since every song was crystal clear and there was no crowd hubbub, murmuring over the top of it all.

It’s funny because this shouldn’t be such an extraordinary experience since it’s commonplace with visual art: you switch your phone off at the cinema and only allow yourself the odd hushed comment during an art exhibition. But where’s the same respect for music? Wolfgang Tillmans questioned this back in 2017 with his show at the Tate Modern There, he had The Playback Room – a space designed for listening to recorded music through a good hi-fi system.

Turnbull echoes Tillmans in this interview with audiophile Steve Guttenberg, saying that “As beautiful as an acoustic instrument sounds right in front of you, the presentation of a laboured-over, recorded, mixed and mastered album is the masterpiece – that’s what I want to listen to.” Nor are he and Tillmans the only ones who think this. Despite the rampant popularity of playlists on streaming services (or even the endless stream of mixes on radio stations), it’s still albums that win prestigious awards at the end of each year – not playlists or mixes. Not only that but people continue to buy and listen to vinyl records either at home or at one of the many listening bars that since the late 2010s has been popping up around Europe and North America, aping Japan’s once booming jazz kissa culture that peaked in the 70s and 80s.

Jazz kissas (cafés) were quiet havens where people could go and listen to imported records that were too expensive to own. Western listening bars have the same intentions, but the reality is very different. Jumbi in Peckham, for example, was once dubbed a listening bar but its Instagram bio reads “Hi Fi Music Bar” – there is no mention of listening – and that’s about right. If you’re going there, you’re going to have a drink and some food and chat to your mates; the music plays in the background like it does in any bar – albeit there’s no mixing, the music’s on vinyl and it’s coming through a great system. This critic argues the same thing about In Sheep’s Clothing in LA, saying it only worked as a listening bar in the daytime when no one was there – and even then the staff would occasionally have to shush people who’d come to use it for a work meeting or a friendly catch-up.

Contrast that to Turnbull’s listening room where after his exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in New York he told Guttenberg that “People don’t talk. I’ve never had to ask anyone not to talk, and people generally don’t look at their phones [...] People stay here for hours to the point where I can’t remember what I’ve played.” It suggests – along with Tillmans’ Playback Room – that a museum is a better place to have these conscious listening experiences. By removing music from a social environment, you strip away any cult status and it becomes purely about the act of listening. I didn’t go to Turnbull’s listening room to hear good jazz, for example – I had no idea what he was going to play, nor do I know much about jazz. I went simply for the experience, and I’m sure many others did, too.

When I spoke to other people about it, the one criticism (besides long wait times on the weekends and some groups being moved on after only hearing one side of a record) was that they’d liked to have listened to something other than just spiritual jazz – which I think is actually a pretty positive response. It suggests a shift in attitude. The listening room has sparked a curiosity to hear things differently so that maybe if places like these were ubiquitous, you’d have more people going out of their way to consciously listen to music, and maybe even to listen to styles they’d never given a proper chance before – or is that too wishful thinking?

But that’s what’s unique about Turnbull’s Dream Listening Room. It’s not that he presents us with a lush place to listen to music (because a museum is nothing compared to those rooms in his MJ magazines or the jazz kissas) but that he’s making us wonder what our music could sound like and if the experience could be more enriching. Some people might scoff at this, saying how it’ll perpetuate an already snobby narrative around jazz and classical music being high art, since their layers and textures would come through better on Turnbull’s setup than say a pop song. And to be fair, there could well be a danger of that. But I guess that’s why Turnbull gave it a number – this is just the beginning, this is just one listening room. Perhaps he hopes that in the future we won’t be reeling about Dream Listening Room, we’ll be on our way to see Dream Listening Room No.100 and maybe at that one they’ll be playing Digital Mystikz’s dubstep or rifling through Jeff Mills’ discography – both equally meditative and transcendental in their own right. Should that day ever come, we can look back at Turnbull’s HiFi Listening Room Dream no.1 and think, “That was when the dream began.”