High-end audio does not have a sound-quality problem. It has a discovery problem.
Too much of the industry’s best equipment is demonstrated at audio shows, dealer events and private listening sessions to people who already understand why someone might spend five figures on a turntable, tube amplifier or pair of horn loudspeakers. Those events matter, but you can only preach to the converted for so long before somebody notices that most of the congregation already owns three turntables and has very strong opinions about 12AX7 tubes.
Which is why what Devon Turnbull and OJAS are doing at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York deserves considerably more attention from the high-end audio industry.
Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3 places a large-scale, handmade OJAS audio system inside Cooper Hewitt’s historic Carnegie Library, where visitors can actually sit down and listen rather than stare at an amplifier sitting silently behind a velvet rope. The installation originally opened in December 2025 as part of the museum’s Art of Noise programming and has now been extended through August 16, 2026.
This Is About More Than OJAS
The significance is not simply that Turnbull has managed to get a high-end audio system inside a Smithsonian museum. It is who gets exposed to it once it is there.
Art of Noise explores more than a century of music and design through over 300 objects and installations, including record players, radios, album artwork, the Sony Walkman, Apple iPod and experimental contemporary audio designs. Those are cultural objects that already mean something to people who may never have attended AXPONA, HIGH END Vienna or CanJam and who probably could not tell you what a moving-coil cartridge is if their life depended on it.
But they understand music. They understand design. Many of them buy vinyl, go to concerts, care about architecture and furniture, collect art, own good headphones or obsess over the way their homes look.
That audience should be fertile ground for high-end audio, yet the industry has historically done an impressive job of making itself difficult to discover.
OJAS is doing the opposite.
A Listening Room Built Around the Space
Dream No. 3 is the third version of Turnbull’s listening-room concept, following earlier installations at Lisson Gallery in New York and London and SFMOMA. For Cooper Hewitt, however, Turnbull designed the system specifically around the museum’s historic Carnegie Library, including custom speaker sculptures influenced by the room’s existing millwork. Cooper Hewitt describes it as the largest and most architecturally and acoustically integrated version of the installation so far.
That matters because the system is not being presented like another pile of expensive components.
It becomes part of the room.
Visitors are encouraged to sit, stop talking, put away the phone and actually listen. The room is programmed every day with selections ranging from classical and ambient music to jazz, while Turnbull, members of the OJAS team, musicians, engineers, collectors and other guest operators have conducted live listening sessions throughout the exhibition.
Turnbull returns for live operator sessions on August 13 and August 15 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., just before the installation closes on August 16.
High End Audio Needs More of This
We have been following Turnbull and OJAS for years, from his collaboration with Denon on the DL-103o moving-coil cartridge to the Klipsch kO-R1 and newer kO-R2 loudspeakers. The Klipsch partnership has been particularly interesting because the products have deliberately appeared outside the normal hi-fi circuit, including Milan Design Week, where the kO-R2 was presented to an audience that crosses architecture, furniture, fashion and industrial design.
We praised that decision at the time, and Cooper Hewitt reinforces why.
High-end audio companies keep asking how they attract younger customers and people outside the existing audiophile community. Perhaps the answer is not another seminar about Ethernet switches in Room 614 of an airport hotel.
Put great systems in museums. Put them in architecture and design exhibitions. Build listening rooms inside record stores, galleries, restaurants and cultural spaces. Partner with musicians, furniture designers and people who already have credibility outside the audiophile bubble. Most importantly, let people hear what a genuinely good system can do without first requiring them to identify as an “audiophile.”
The industry sometimes forgets that almost nobody wakes up one morning and decides they need a $20,000 pair of loudspeakers. They hear something that changes their perception of reproduced music, become curious and start moving down the rabbit hole.
Some eventually spend $500. Some spend $5,000. A few lose all fiscal judgment and start pricing Swiss monoblock amplifiers.
But somebody has to open the door.
The Bottom Line
HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3 is worth celebrating not simply because Devon Turnbull built another visually distinctive OJAS system, but because Cooper Hewitt has placed serious high-fidelity reproduction inside a broader conversation about music, culture and design.
That exposes high-end audio to people who might otherwise never experience it, and the industry needs considerably more of that.
Audio shows and specialist dealers remain essential, but they predominantly reach consumers who have already walked through the door. If high-end audio really wants to expand its audience, it needs to start appearing in places where curious music lovers are already standing.
OJAS figured that out.
Everyone else might want to take notes.
For more information: cooperhewitt.org
Related Reading:
- Klipsch OJAS KO-R2 Speaker Debuts At Milan Design Week 2026: Only 600 Pairs, Don’t Expect Them To Last Long
- Klipsch KO-R1 Limited Edition: OJAS Hosts ‘Exclusive’ Listening Sessions At RubenBenjamin Studio In Munich – Leb Das Leben, Bevor Es Dich Überholt!
- Denon Teams With Devon Turnbull Of OJAS To Reimagine The DL-103R Moving Coil Cartridge
- Klipsch And OJAS Partner On KO-R1 Limited Edition Horn Speaker And We All Want A Pair
- Klipsch Heritage First Listen At High End Vienna 2026: Rebellion, OJAS And Klipschorn Bring The Horns
Michael Little
August 9, 2026 at 7:13 pm
Great commentary as always Ian, I really wish I could have visited this in person.
Hopefully this encourages a new interest in the industry outside of the already converted.
Ian White
August 9, 2026 at 7:22 pm
Mike,
Much appreciated.
The industry needs exhibitions like this in every city. If you don’t make it accessible and unique — you will never grow the base. Devon is a far superior marketer than 95% of the industry. He understands that a hi-fi show isn’t moving the needle at all for him.
IW