Look closely at the audio system in the photo. It belongs to my friend, and fellow audio seeker, Devon Turnbull (aka Ojas). Notice every object in the room, particularly the arrangement of amplifiers, and turntables, and that awesome herd of cartridges on the table in front of the listening chair. May I suggest you regard these diverse objects as ceremonial utensils arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner, for the pleasure of the main listener. For the sake of this short story, I will honor myself with the title of Shokyaku (Japanese for main guest) and my friend Devon as my esteemed host Teishu).
This tale of record-playing and discovery will be most clear if you consider the events I am about to describe as ritual communions practiced in front of an altar made of carefully fashioned and arranged gray boxes.
I imagine most of you have been honored listening guests, sitting in the preferred, centrally located chair, facing your host’s sound system. And surely you’ve been asked, “What would you like to hear?” You hope for a Wow! moment but know full well that the disc you’ve selected may sound less good on this system than you remember it on yours. I’ve been in that situation countless times, and I have learned that good manners require the honored guest to keep useless chatter to a minimum while focusing their attention as completely as possible on the recording. Good manners also means speaking about the music first, asking only essential questions about the audio hardware. Most important is to refrain from bringing up topics like money or politics that could debase or derail this unique form of shared aesthetic experience.
Devon and I share this view: the ceremonial playing of records is something akin to the Japanese tea ceremony (cha-no-yu)—that listening with friends is intrinsically about intimacy, reverie, and the feelings of bonding that result from Teishu honoring Shokyaku, and vice-versa. It’s about the intoxication that results from hearing thoughtfully selected recordings presented by cultured hosts dedicated to pleasing guests with their evolved taste in music and their audio utensils.
Whenever I visit Devon Turnbull, I leave his den invigorated, with a mind full of new ideas and a short list of previously unknown music to explore.
The last time I visited, the last recording Devon played was side 1 of Daniel Lanois’s Belladonna (LP, Anti-86767). As the album played, in the image field in front of the speakers, I observed what I then described as “sound-flowers.” The sounds of Lanois’s ethereal pedal steel appeared as floor-to-ceiling bouquets of colorful, expanding and contracting clouds—of billowing, explicitly textured harmonic energy. This appealing visual-sonic effect was presented with a dense, feel-it-in-the-air tactility and effortless dynamics. Even at whisper-level volumes, I could feel sound energy tickling the room’s boundaries.
Hidden behind that fantastic 31.5″ Fostex FW800HS “Super Woofer,” a new addition to Devon’s system, stands an elegant old white-marble fireplace. As I sat listening, I remembered the fireplace, deciding its beauty was quaint and ordinary compared to the show-stealing presence of that sub-bass colossus. This gray-painted speaker system is only one product of Devon’s larger creative practice, which includes fashion design, product design, interior design, speaker-and-amplifier design, music production, and fine art.
I asked Devon how he was able to create such an easy-flowing, natural-sounding audio system. He said he grew up listening with fancy hi-fi, that his father was a serious audiophile with MartinLogan speakers and massive monoblock amplifiers. But it was his exposure to Joe Roberts’s Sound Practices magazine that started his journey of triode-horn discovery, a journey that took off in earnest about 20 years ago in Japan, where Devon began scouring the back alleys of Tokyo’s Akihabara, where he discovered Sun Audio and encountered whole stores devoted to moving coil cartridges, and when he began studying the pages of MJ Audio Technology and Stereo Sound magazines.
Devon told me he was educated about Western Electric and Altec horns by Koji Wakabayashi at EIFL and spent time listening and learning in Paris with William Walther at Maison de L’Audiophile. Today, Devon and I hang and play records with many of the same friends, including my “second wife” Steve Guttenberg (The Audiophiliac) and my amp-designer brothers JC Morrison (Silbatone) and Noriyasu Komuro (Komuro Amplifier Company).
It is okay to stare at that Super Woofer because without noticeably moving, this giant cone made the cleanest, most real-sounding, not–huff-n-puff bass I have ever experienced from a home audio system. It generated a more lifelike corporeality than any domestic horn or subwoofer bass I’ve encountered. My eyes saw the big cone, but my ears couldn’t tell where it was. The transparent nature of that big cone’s bass assists Devon’s complete four-way system in sounding big and easy while projecting a soundspace that expands, with unrestrained dynamics, beyond the room’s boundaries.
Devon’s satellite speakers feature Altec’s revered 1505B multicell horn, powered by vintage 24 ohm Altec 288C compression drivers, sitting atop ported bass boxes designed by Devon. Each gray speakerbox is powered by two 12″ Altec 414B woofers, custom-fabricated for Turnbull/Ojas by Great Plains Audio. Once you stop staring at the altar boxes, you might notice two shiny, quite heavy, not-inexpensive little objects that I believe contribute dramatically to this system’s extreme transparency and spatial descriptiveness: Pioneer’s PT-R9 beryllium ribbon tweeters. The crossover is all passive and features custom autoformers by Werner Jagusch.
That entire wall-filling regiment of boxes and horns is powered by an Isamu Asano– inspired, 2W 2A3 amplifier, made in Japan by Koji Wakabayashi for Ojas, or, alternatively, by a Western Electric WE-248A– tubed amp designed by Arthur Loesch.
Devon played that Daniel Lanois album with a rare, newly acquired, new-old-stock Sony XL-55 Pro moving coil cartridge attached to a Dynavector DV-505 tonearm, connected to a pair of Altec 4722 microphone transformers and a Steve Berger–designed RIAA stage.
When I posted a photo of Devon’s system on Facebook, it got a lot of Likes, a significant number of which were from my former art students: mostly female, highly literate, and all under the age of 35. This suggests that young non-audiophiles from the intelligentsia perceive the Devon Turnbull–Ojas audio aesthetic in a positive light. As do I.
EJ Jordan Marlow full-range loudspeaker
I began this story by introducing you to Devon because I wanted you to study his triode-horn assemblage and imagine what that group might sound like playing your records, and also because his searching audio journey reminds me of my own. I’ve been messing with DIY amps and speakers my whole life.
Speaker photos: Dayve Ward, Photography By Ward
My first DIY speaker project was a standmount two-way using Dynaudio drivers with first-order crossover filters. It sounded okay but looked like a roughly hewn approximation of a Sonus Faber speaker. My second was a Herb version of a Dahlquist DQ-10, which at the time was a popular audiophile speaker I really liked but couldn’t afford. My DIY DQ-10 had a wrap-around grille and woofers scavenged from a pair of Large Advents. On an open plywood baffle above the woofer, I arranged a 5″ paper-cone midrange driver, a 1″ cloth-dome tweeter, and a Panasonic ribbon super-tweeter. Unfortunately, I never got the crossover right.
None of my DQ-10 experiments were satisfying, but they resulted in me becoming a life-long devotee of open-baffle speakers and ribbon tweeters.
A small advertisement in the back of a British audio magazine turned me on to Ted Jordan’s 50mm alloy-cone “modules.” For me, the idea of an almost full-range driver with no crossover was compelling. I ordered a pair, built one speaker (with an Advent woofer), and voila! I was a card-carrying Jordan-module cultist.
My cult-initiation project featured a single 50mm EJ Jordan driver mounted on a 44″ high, 20″ wide plywood baffle. I loved this speaker instantly. It—well, two of them—imaged incredibly well. Its sound was very Quad/Stax electrostatic-like. Then I tried an arrangement with two Jordan modules and a Panasonic ribbon tweeter mounted on a floorstanding, wood-capped Sonotube cardboard cylinder. These sounded pretty okay but looked really good in their full, wrap-around grilles inspired by DCM Time Windows—another speaker I liked but couldn’t afford.
My Jordan-driver experiments got kicked to the side when I acquired my first of many pairs of well-used Western Electric 755A full-range public-address drivers. These venerable Westerns featured paper-and-silk cones and large Alnico magnets. I tried them in sealed boxes, then aperiodic boxes; then, ultimately, mounted on open plywood baffles. I drove the 755s with homemade push-pull 2A3 amps, but their unpredictable bass and treble rolloff—every WE755 I found measured differently at its frequency extremes—prevented them from being fully satisfactory in stereo.
I did not return to the Jordan mindset until the late 1990s, when I abandoned my work in commercial audio for writing, amp-building, and art. I was living on a boat when I reviewed the Jordan-driver–equipped Konus Essence loudspeaker for Art Dudley’s Listener magazine. In that story, I concluded, “They don’t make me dance as much as they make me think.” I advised readers that to live happily with 4″ metal-cone full-range drivers, one must be philosophically biased toward the no-crossover, phase-correct, time-correct, small-speaker state of mind. Konus Essence users traded bass power, bass extension, and high SPLs for the precision, coherency, and immediacy of a loudspeaker employing a single, small driver.
Edward James “Ted” Jordan was born in 1928 and died in 2016. He began designing loudspeakers in London in 1942. His first article on loudspeaker design was published in 1951. His seminal book, Loudspeakers, was published in 1962. He introduced his first full-range driver, the Jordan-Watts, in 1963. He started Ted Jordan Designs in 1982. He devoted his life to the design and manufacture of just one thing: a smartly engineered audio-frequency driver that operates wide-range at conspicuously low levels of distortion.
After more than 50 years of mostly OEM and DIY sales, EJ Jordan (footnote 1) now offers the Marlow full-range box speaker. It features the Jordan-designed super-wideband (specified 44Hz–18kHz ±6dB) Eikona drive-unit, which is ensconced in a luxuriously finished, walnut-veneered, front-ported, roughly LS3/5a-sized cabinet that EJ Jordan’s Colin Shelbourn describes like this:
“The enclosure is as close to the original BBC thin-wall spec as possible, so: 9mm birch ply walls, beech battens along all edges, and removable front and rear panels. The BBC research department really got all that right, and even the tensioning of the screws holding the panels to the battens makes a difference. The enclosure walls are damped with heavy pads (a modern material rather than the bitumen pads available in the 1970s), but there is no bracing.
“There are also no network or response-shaping components, just a direct connection between the speaker-wire sockets and the Eikona full-range driver. Everything is designed to let Ted’s driver perform at its best.
“The Eikona’s magnet is ferrite; and, the finished drive-unit is assembled by ScanSpeak in Denmark using components we design and manufacture here in the UK. These include Ted’s proprietary Controflex alloy cone with its unique profile, plus his unique suspension and damping components and the central phase-plug elements.”
Footnote 1: E. J. Jordan Ltd. Web: ejjordan.co.uk
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ARTICLE CONTENTS
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Marlow Measurements
EJ Jordan Manufacturer’s Comment
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