What Price Perfection?

What Price Perfection?

When Ken Fritz died, many individuals puzzled what would grow to be of his stereo system. Fritz’s rig was the stuff of legend. The audiophile from Chesterfield, Virginia, had constructed a lot of it along with his personal arms, together with line-array audio system too tall to slot in most individuals’s houses. They took 5400 hours to finish and have been appraised at greater than $200,000. He additionally designed and constructed a three-arm turntable that sat on a novel 1500lb antivibration platform. Fritz felt that his "Frankentable" rivaled or bested document gamers costing effectively into six figures.

That was just the start. In the Nineteen Eighties, when he began dreaming about constructing "the most effective stereo system on this planet," Fritz determined he’d want a room to match, so he constructed that, too, utilizing a celebrated live performance corridor in Osaka, Japan, as a digital blueprint. With frequent assist from his kids and some mates, he reworked the lounge of his household’s split-level suburban ranch right into a 55′ × 30′ music house with a ceiling that assorted between 12′ and 17′ tall. 24,000 cubic ft of acoustic splendidness.

Few of us would find out about Ken Fritz’s single-minded pursuit if it weren’t for the 58-minute movie his son Scott, an audio engineer in Chicago, made in 2018. One Man’s Dream, Scott known as it—a title that subtly eliminated himself and the remainder of the household from his dad’s obsession. The video racked up two million views on YouTube (footnote 1).

When I watched it a couple of years again, Fritz’s monomaniacal devotion to excellent sound impressed me, however I used to be additionally struck by his inflexible adherence to symmetry, which typically appeared to return on the expense of the room acoustics he’d labored so onerous to good. Against the entrance wall of his majestic listening house stood two similar grandfather clocks. Like the pair of foot-tall ceramic Nipper canine, they have been rigorously positioned so that every lengthy facet of the room mirrored the opposite. A telltale truth I observed was that the ticking clocks’ pendulums swung forwards and backwards in unison, the tip factors of their sweeps completely synchronized. This was the room of a person who was no stranger to OCD-like extra.

One Man’s Dream additionally gave viewers an offhand glimpse into Fritz Sr.’s darkening future. He’d simply been recognized with ALS, an incurable neurodegenerative illness that slowly robs sufferers of muscle management. By 2020, Fritz had issue speaking and swallowing. Soon, he not had the fantastic motor abilities to deal with his 28,000 vinyl records or his a number of tonearms. An iPad with Roon nonetheless let him choose music and hear—for some time. In April 2022, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Ken Fritz handed away.

I’d like to say, "But his system lives on." Fritz mentioned many occasions that he wished it to remain intact. His household tried to discover a purchaser for the gathering of kit, bundled with the home if want be. No takers emerged. So final fall, an online-auction firm catalogued the turntables, the audio system, the numerous Krell amps and crossovers and numerous fine details, and bought all of them piecemeal (footnote 2). The Frankentable went for slightly below 20 grand. The audio system fetched $10,100. All day lengthy on November 30, patrons carted off their new possessions in U-Haul vehicles after collectively forking over $156,800. Fritz’s system, mentioned to have price 1,000,000 {dollars}, scattered to the winds.

It appeared like a sobering sufficient story. A good friend of mine quoted Ozymandias, Percy Shelley’s well-known poem about how destiny and the ravages of time lay waste to ambition and hubris. ("Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!")

But the entire Fritz saga hadn’t been informed but. This previous January, the Washington Post printed a front-page profile (footnote 3) of the person that set the audiophile world abuzz. Although the article, by Geoff Edgers, one of many paper’s finest reporters, was removed from unsympathetic, some noticed it as a success piece. Fritz’s life not appeared the stuff of somber nineteenth century sonnets. Greek tragedy could be extra prefer it.

Edgers, who knew Fritz personally and had taken notes for years, calls the reputed million-dollar price ticket of the vaunted stereo system "a quantity that didn’t start to replicate the damage and tear on the family, the hidden prices of his kids’s unpaid labor."

The article particulars how Fritz usually handled his household as an afterthought—a distant third precedence after his profitable fiberglass-molds enterprise and his valuable listening room. Vacations have been a rarity for the Fritz clan. To his credit score, he belatedly understood that he’d made some uncertain decisions, as he informed Edgers. "I used to be a father just about in title. I wasn’t a typical father or a typical husband."

Adding to the exposition of household turmoil was the outline of a primary spouse mentioned to drink an excessive amount of and to be dismissive of her husband’s passions. When he performed Swan Lake, his favourite piece, she known as it "Pig Pond" in entrance of the youngsters and cranked up the TV to harass him. The marriage led to divorce.

Meanwhile, Ken typically dragged his younger sons off the bed at 6am to work on the stereo undertaking. "I used to be mainly his slave," Kurt, the oldest youngster, informed Edgers.

Years later, after the ALS analysis, Kurt and Ken had a horrible falling out, the Post article mentioned. It centered on a few comparatively modest household possessions Kurt wished, together with an previous Rek-O-Kut turntable. The son additionally took offense at his dad’s reluctance to share the fruits of their collective labor with him when he visited the magnificent room and stereo. Kurt thought Ken was being egocentric and miserly. Ken felt Kurt acted conceited and entitled. After a couple of drinks, Kurt mentioned one thing from which neither man may get better. According to the Post, he informed his father, "I would like you to die sluggish, motherfucker. Die sluggish."

Ken known as his lawyer and disinherited his son. Four years later, his daughter Betsy pleaded together with her dying father to take a cellphone name from Kurt which may have eased the boys’s mutual guilt. Stubborn until the tip, Ken refused.

In the 3500+ feedback appended to the Post story, many went past mentioning that Fritz’s ardour got here on the expense of his household. Some commenters went as far as to assert that Fritz wasted his life. That’s a judgment he most likely did not deserve, as we’ll see.

The final a part of the Ken Fritz chronicle will seem within the June 2024 situation’s My Back Pages.

Footnote 1: See youtube.com/@kenfritz3813.

Footnote 2: See shorturl.at/rxJVW.

Footnote 3: See shorturl.at/ilvyJ.

HI-FI News

by way of Stereophile.com https://ift.tt/RloxbmB

March 27, 2024 at 01:59PM