We’ve all seen the excesses that the Golden Ears set revel in; the five-figure power conditioning boxes, the gold-plated HDMI cables. As covered by the Washington Post, however, [Ken Fritz] may have gone farther than most. Before he passed away, he estimated that he spent a million dollars on the greatest possible hi-fi setup he could imagine.
There’s plenty of hardcore gear in the rig. Massive cabinets loaded with carefully-tuned speaker drivers. A $50,000 record player built into a 1,500-pound weighted base for the utmost in stability and vibration resistance. Expensive cartridges, top-tier reel-to-reel decks, and amplifiers worth more than most used cars.
As the piece explores, [Fritz] knew that none of that was enough. Sound is all about the space as much as it is the equipment. Thus, the family home itself was transformed to become the ultimate listening environment in turn. The listening room got everything from concrete floors and its own HVAC and electrical systems. Much of the equipment was custom built to avoid wasting money on overpriced name-brand gear. The story of the kit was also the subject of a documentary shared online, by the name of One Man’s Dream.
The piece examines what goes into a top-tier setup like this, while also exploring the human cost that [Fritz’s] passion had on him and his family. The ending is sad and brutal in a way you wouldn’t think a story about hi-fi gear ever could be. It’s an education in more ways then one, and teaches us that it’s worth keeping an eye on the rest of our lives while pursuing what we enjoy the most. Video after the break.
He got suckered for every audio gimmick on the planet. Poor guy. Each to his own
I don’t see any Nordost cables so he can still take it up a notch
It’s His money! It’s His passion! The key word is His!
YOU didn’t earn it
YOU didn’t plan it
YOU didn’t complete it
”YOU therefore have NO right to declare him to have been suckered on anything!
I appreciate his willingness to share his creativity and passion and would love to hear it!
So just because he spent his money, we can’t mock his idiocy? He’s another victim of audiovoodoo fad.
A fool and his money are soon parted…
You have no idea what you are talking about, and have clearly not read anything he said or watched the video before revealing your insane level of stupidity or ignorance.
You never listened to any beyond some Walmart special headphones or speakers.
Suggest that you read the article in the Post. Overworked the family to accomplish his unachievable goals.
For a $meg you could have just had people play live music in your house whenever you wanted.
.
Also, I think Henry Rollins has a million dollar rig or something.
Do you actually realise that a lot of that money was spent on the room, it’s construction and it’s acoustics so music would sound good?
Ever heard live music in a crap sounding venue?
How to say you know nothing about quality sound, live, recorded or otherwise without actually saying so.
Or that you have no sense of irony or humor. It seems.
I’ve been laying out professional sound systems for over 30 years. This is absurd, your protestations notwithstanding.
Honestly, I enjoy listening to live music whatever the acoustics, but it’s rare that I go somewhere that sounds bad enough that I actually notice.
I see nothing admirable about any of that.
“Much of the equipment was custom built to avoid wasting money on overpriced name-brand gear.”
Oh, the irony!
It’s true though. When you look at drivers alone, the best ones, with a proper flat response, are expensive. I’ve listened to DIY speakers that had 10.000 euro (a piece) tweeters inside them. That was 40.000 euro’s for just tweeters in two speakers, without anything else. Then there’s the midrange, subs etc that also cost a lot of money. The clarity was so amazing.
I have a colleague who builds hifi equipment for people like this, in his spare time. The trouble he has to go through, to get parts that work as he wants them to work, is insane. For example, take a resistor. Inside a normal digital device, the resistor quality is usually not all that important. But with audio, it’s extremely important as it directly effects the audio, if it’s inside the analogue circuit. He buys expensive resistors that have a much lower tolerance, and even then, he throws more than half of them away. Same goes for every other component. He measures everything and everything has to be perfect or it’s going in the trash. The cables inside the speakers need the right amount and thickness of strands, so he imports them from the US, he imports other parts from Canada, UK, etc etc etc. Some parts, for example the drivers he uses, are custom build, just for him, to his specifications. But the end result is amazing. I’ve listened to his equipment and it’s really really good. I’m not going to pay 3000 euro’s for a phono amplifier or 8000 euro for a single speaker, but others do. When you take the bill of material into account, you can clearly see that it’s not that expensive, considering all the components. He’s a man of science and wants proof of everything.
For the components that don’t meet spec, resell them on Ebay for half price to recover some of the cost. (Unless they cost a trivial amount or are outright defective.)
pointless snakeoil quackery
“everything you can measure is snakeoil quackery” – had37b8e5c7066e
you can’t seriously believe any of that snake oil makes a hoot of difference to anything but how much money you can extract from gullible audiofools
Making speakers with a very flat frequency response over a wide range of angles, and with very low distortion at high loudness, is a difficult undertaking. The components required to do so are not cheap. There are people who can tell the difference between a nearly perfect speaker and one with minor flaws, and those differences can be characterized by acoustical measurements.
Tweeters are particularly difficult. Take a look at the published specifications for tweeters costing even $500, and be appalled at how bad the frequency response is, especially off-axis.
Whether it’s worth the money is a different question from “does it really cost that much to make a superb speaker?”
The guy let his obsession poison his family and other relationships, and that’s undeniably sad. But his sound system is a pretty remarkable achievement, like climbing Everest. He was a successful businessman, so it was his money to play with. And he knew his stuff: he acquired a professional level of technical knowledge to the point where he could engineer audio gear at the highest level. He wasn’t just buying stuff off a shelf based on some ad or the latest magazine.
He fell out with his oldest son and they were never reconciled. His middle son Scott shared his passion and is now a recording engineer, I believe.
Why would someone have that many grandfather clocks in a single room? Or is this like those people that have a bank of clocks to tell the time in different countries except with grandfather clocks?
Why do i hear “also sprach Zaratustra” in my head?
I think Freemasonry is a hype it will not stay long :-D
greetz from one of the old coal mining lodges
The irony is that at 76 his hearing has probably degraded enough that all that gear really won’t make up for the loss of frequency sensitivity those old ears have. In fact many retirees do this boondoggle to varying extents and yes they are “living their dream” but that is just it… it is an unattainable dream that maybe the pocketbook can partially fulfill but degraded worn out biological equipment can’t “meet the demands”. At 60 I can say that isn’t ageism but physiological reality.
His (grand)children would be able to fully enjoy it, though.
That just shows stereotypical (pun unintentional) misunderstanding of hearing loss and how people experience it.
Unless hearing loss is really advanced, most seniors who are hifi hobbyists do not jack the treble, or listen at levels any higher than most other hifi hobbyists. If sound and music are your passion, you’ve been training your ears and despite age- related hearing loss, tinnitis, etc, you still can tell good sound from bad. You don’t see old people at the symphony yelling at the flutes to play louder.
There are many musicians, engineers and producers who have worked into their 70s and beyond despite some hearing loss.
Case in point, Al Schmitt, a recording engineer who had over 20 Grammy’s to his name, worked till he was about 90.
exactly, Beethoven too was 80 and deaf when he wrote his third symphony.
So true! The whole point of Hi-Fi is to create a high fidelity replication of the sound of a real musical performance. If I hear nothing much above say 10khz, I hear nothing in real music above that, I’m not going to boost the treble on my stereo. That would of course sound unnatural. There is a lot more to music and music reproduction than just high frequency response.
You should check out YT on Al Schmitt, one of the most awarded recording engineers ever, 20+ Grammy’s. He was working at Capitol Studios in LA pretty much right up till he died a couple of years ago, he was 91. Undoubtedly his hearing would have degraded, but he was still able to make great recordings. Makes you wonder…
Okay I would have to admit there are exceptions as with any assertion based on human ability or human tendencies. It still doesn’t invalidate my assertion that for many this obsessive desire to craft audio perfection may be silly and impractical. Again if someone is obsessive they can do whatever they want when they want I am not stopping them though I have observed many elder audiophiles with very expensive stereos and hearing aids. For many it seems more a desire for bragging rights. Which again is fine, its a free world (mostly). From my experience the difference between a decent system and an audiophile system is perhaps 5% and $50,000 or more. Hackaday has had plenty of articles about people with technical obsessions, persons with the biggest phone collection, computer collection, most expensive stereo or computer or O-scope. While the reading is interesting many of us (though not all) ultimately find some of these obsessions silly and might even have interests in similar areas but realize our passions are more moderate. The costs of these obsessions seem very similar a lifetime acquiring and constructing a very limited time enjoying and toward the end (as in this video) a deal of time towards the end fretting about whats going to happen to the fruits of our obsession after we die. It seems to me to be a rather frustrating cycle that many seem to not learn from the errors of others. As a kid I wanted to be like Forrest J. Ackerman who had this huge sci-fi collection. He kind of lived in this hoarder’s tunnel home filled floor to ceiling with memorabilia. In later years much of his time was spent agonizing over how to keep it and preserve it. It ultimately didn’t end well for him and to me it served as a life lesson. Perhaps your mileage may vary. I wish you all well.
what’s with all the negativity about this guy’s hobby?
He had a dream and he made it happen. He’s got an awesome system. He built it all himself. He says he’s accomplished all he wanted in his life.
He died just as he thought he achieved his goal. He barely had time to enjoy it, and he destroyed his family in the process…pretty negative I’d say…and I say that as a dedicated audiophile myself.
Fritz was using and enjoying the system(s) the whole time he was building them.
Agreed, he comes over very knowledgeable too if you watch the documentary.
Every technical detail seems to be accounted for.
Because most of them have never heard a good system, not to mention a great system.
They think Sonos, Bose or iPods are all you need.
But basically, they are tone deaf and think every one else is too.
And probably a fair bit of jealously that they don’t have that sort of money to spend on thier passion and to knock someone’s passion down is their small minded way of dealing with it.
Sad people being sad.
In the article I read, the negativity is more about the way the man’s hobby damaged his relationships than the hobby itself. Not only did he use family for free labor, apparently eventually guests stopped coming to his house as he’d get them to work on his project.
Seems like he had the wrong sort of friends going into this then – I’d go visit my buddy BECAUSE they are building something and could use a hand. And that seems to be a very common feeling among folks that make stuff – either do come use my tool on your project, or sure I can come round to help you do whatever it is you need an extra hand or the expertise I have and you don’t for. I can understand how the family relationships can suffer if you are overly obsessed with the project though, even if free labour from the family seems very normal to me…
Your ears are clapped out long before you can afford such a system.
I like a bit of hifi and I would love to have a set-up even one hundredth as effective as this but in the end it’s the music that matters, not the quality of the reproduction (or audition).
Good reproduction makes the experience better.
Nice, but systems like this aren’t new…and all the owners aren’t suckers for audio woo. http://burwenaudio.com/Sound_System.html
So why not buy a bunch of bargan basement speakers, charachtarize each speaker in its final location within the room. And then digitally pre-distort the signals to every individuak speaker in isolation to minimise the nonlinearities. And digitally pre-distort for the amplifiers used. With a large enough number of mems microphones around the sweet spot you could probably calculate the pre-distortions for each recording.
you answered the question yourself there. You can only minimize the nonlinearities. the simple fact that you have digital in the signal chain means you have some distortion. This also doesn’t address the second issue of external noise like a car driving by or your neighbors mowing their lawn.
Your idea actually has a lot of merit as a lot of higher end home theater systems work as you describe.
Personally, I normally listen to music on a $20 Bluetooth speaker so you can see where I land on these issues.
“the simple fact that you have digital in the signal chain means you have some distortion”
True, to some extent.
Just as true:
“the simple fact that you have analog in the signal chain means you have some distortion”
A simple part in the analog domain can cause all kinds of problems. Do you know why they don’t use ceramic capacitors in the signal path of audio amplifiers? It’s because the voltage across a ceramic capacitor changes the capacitance. More voltage, lower capacitance. That causes all kinds of problems for the signal.
It isn’t some simple “digital bad, analog good” or even “analog bad, digital good” thing.
Here is some Adaptive Digital PreDistortion FPGA gateware for SDR ( https://github.com/myriadrf/LimeADPD ). It is not the same as it would be for audio, but the overall concept would be similar in many ways.
In audio (and cooking, and elsewhere), you start with the best possible components, and then use the MINIMUM of other stuff to improve on that. You want to screw with the signal as little as possible. Decent speaker drivers are not that expensive; absolutely no reason to use crap ones, if the goal is the best reproduction and no constraints like miniaturization (eg tablet speakers, bluetooth speakers, etc)
an amplifier that distorts to any audible degree is a pretty bad amplifier, it’s not the 1960’s anymore
Open loop correction of distortion is difficult, and since it’s likely to vary with frequency it’s likely impossibly difficult.
One of the goals of hifi is to be able to identify specifically where a sound is coming from. Cheap speakers aren’t designed to meet this goal, and the more of them you have the worse the situation is.
Speakers age. Foam, rubber, and cellulose products degrade over time and your initial corrections become increasingly inaccurate. Wood changes with both temperature and humidity. Play loud music and the speaker’s voice coil heats up, which increases its resistance and thereby changes its characteristics as an electro-acoustic transducer.
Some improvements are possible, but starting with cheap speakers is an invitation to frustration.
I agree with Mime. The man had a dream and pursued it. The whiny, jealous naysayers here are exhibiting their inability to appreciate a sense of accomplishment they have not and will never achieve.
To all the naysayers, I say, What’s your problem? I’m sure all of us have our foibles.
Basically, his money, his rules. Get over it.
What was sad and brutal? Did I miss something hidden in the end? Maybe he found out that they were really Radio Shack speakers? Was that it?
The video says he has ALS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALS
50% of people diagnosed with ALS die within 4 years.
He’s sort of under a death sentence – he only has a few years more with his family. He spent the last few decades building his sound system to the detriment of his family life. Now he’s going to lose both in just a few years.
Fritz died in April 2022.
It was at the end of the pay-walled article. Besides the cost of personal relationships with his family, he developed ALS shortly after completing this project, and lost the dexterity to place a record album on that turntable. After he passed, nobody wanted to purchase the house/stereo as a whole, and against his wishes, it was sold piecemeal. He spent a million, but everything sold for a bit over $100K.
Much, perhaps most of the $million was spent on the room construction, and a sizeable chunk of the rest probably went into tools and instrumentation, iterating through builds/rebuilds of custom gear, and other costs for custom work. Does the million also include the record library?
So getting $185k at auction for just the gear is not horrible, considering how small the market is for such unique stuff. For example I’m guessing his ginormous speakers would be parted out by most purchasers, cos who else would else have a room like that to use them in?
Yeah, I am a bit curious about cost breakdown. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the record collection was the cheapest category, grabbing lots of records in auction lots, etc. Besides the room, the design/construction of the speakers and some aspects of the turntable were his personal work. He implies that he worked for Thiel Audio at some point. All of the electronics I can see in the video were production models – Krell processor/amps, Oppo CD/DVD/BD player, APC power conditioners, etc. I suspect he didn’t get into instrumentation, measurements, and iterating. He even admitted in the video, that if he didn’t get it perfect, he would have lied to himself that it was still the best. I suppose I can respect that honesty, because it illustrates how the audiophile world diverges from science.
Looks like the 3 front speakers fetched about $10K. I bet he spent more on the drivers that went into them.
From the end of the article:
“Late last summer, Betsy realized she had to let go. Another couple wanted to buy the house — but not the stereo. She made a deal with a local online auction site, eBid Local, to catalogue and sell her father’s life’s work.
These people knew nothing about concert-hall acoustics, setting the vertical tracking angle or the magic of the perfect “Swan Lake” recording. They knew marketing.
“We euphemistically refer to it as the ‘million-dollar, monumental, magical, musical masterpiece,’” said David Staples, the owner of eBid Local. “It may be the best, most elaborate and exquisite private residential audiophile system in the country, perhaps even in the world.”
Many of the records her father had spent a lifetime collecting had already been sold — and Betsy understood that the system itself would almost certainly be parceled out to multiple buyers as well.
So what, ultimately, would be the value of the world’s greatest stereo?
The auction closed just before Thanksgiving.
The Frankentable? There were 44 bids, the top at a mere $19,750.
The 10-foot-tall speakers? After 18 bids, an Indiana man named Carlton Bale snagged all three for $10,100. Less than you’d pay for a pair of Yamaha NS-5000 bookshelf speakers.
A fan of Fritz’s YouTube documentary, Bale had set out a couple of years ago to build what he imagined would be “the second-best loudspeaker in the world” — until he heard about the Fritz auction.
“I thought, ‘Do I really have the time to build the speakers I want that probably aren’t going to sound as good as the ones Ken built?’” Bale recently recalled, after driving to Virginia with a U-Haul to fetch them last month. The price, he conceded, was “a steal. The bargain of a lifetime.”
The total take for the million-dollar stereo system, including the speakers, the turntable, the dozens of other components from detached cones to the reel-to-reel decks? $156,800.
But perhaps that was always going to be its fate. Last summer, when pressed about the value of Ken Fritz’s life’s work, Staples had demurred.
The value, the auctioneer said, was whatever somebody else was willing to pay for it.
Fritz’s home stereo system was a labor of love. After his death, despite his wish that it remain intact, it was sold off piece by piece. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)”
Vinyl? There’s not much that annoys me but people claiming that vinyl is the best audio format are just plain deluded. Horrible frequency response, especially in lower frequencies, so many stupid compromises.
Sure, the masters may be nice and there’s a lot of content that’s hard to get in other formats, but better to rip it to 24bit 96kHz FLAC and play that… also can play sounds in that format that would be impossible on vinyl.
Speakers and amps are nice however, even though this example is more of a fetish!
Worked 20+ years as mastering engineer.
Vinyl SNR is roughly equivalent of a 12 bit (being generous) PCM, can sound great anyway because for most uses 70dB is enough.
Hi-Res audio is the new snake oil however, 16/44 with its plain 96dB *undithered* (w/o noise shaping) is just fine ^_^
The popularity of vinyl is a blend of nostalgia and fetish, as well as a package experience – cover art, liner notes, colored vinyl. And there’s an aspect of collectability – limited runs, seeking out rarities, etc.
Playing an LP is a commitment. You have to first invest in the gear, and most people who do have above-average systems. You pull out a disk to listen to. You place it carefully on the platter, give it a careful brushing, place the needle carefully on the lead-in… and then you actually listen. 15 to 22 minutes later you repeat the steps when it’s time to flip the disk over.
Yes CD and the better streaming formats are capable of better fidelity. But when you take into account that most people are playing those into Bluetooth speakers, earbuds or similar, and their music is mostly just wallpaper or distraction while doing something else… then it’s easy to understand why playing vinyl is often associated with higher fidelity.
If you actually care that CDs sound better than vinyl, you’re already a budding audiophile ;-).
It’s always amusing to see people on HaD ripping into vinyl and audiophiles, yet cheering as other people resurrect absolutely wretched and useless last-millenium toy computers. To each their own, maybe?
Not the standard version, but the fancier bluetooth codecs are supposed to fall into the area of CD quality more or less. But honestly, the usual biggest thing is that unless you have perfect acoustics and zero background noise, then speakers are worse than putting things in your ears. “Chi-Fi” iem’s can be pretty cheap, and don’t really need more than Apple’s surprisingly decent $10 usb to 3.5mm adapter to work with a computer or something.
YouTube comments say he died and they auctioned off the rig for $185k.
I’m not knocking that at all, but it just speaks to what a hobby is. Do your hobby for you and enjoy it for the experience. Watching and skipping around the actual documentary this dude loved every minute of what he was doing. He enjoyed the experience. I think about stuff like that while I’m building a (useless) model ship for hours or designing and building a ham radio that by all metrics sucks compared to even a $20 SDR.
I mean. Even a hobbyist woodworker can amass a substantial amount of $$$ worth of equipment that when we go will be sold for Pennie’s on the dollar. And probably be a burden on top of that to whoever has to sell and move a piece of cast iron that weighs a ton.
My wife has said that a week after my funeral, my stuff goes to the curb with 25 cent price tags.
B^)
I’ve been thread-bombing here but I have to say how much I agree with this.
My uncle was a keen hobby woodworker with a big budget. When he passed, I helped my cousin move those cast-iron beasts. (My cousin is also a talented woodworker. ) But yeah, that stuff would have been a burden if there was no interested family member to take it.
My uncle was also into hifi, and when they were clearing out the house, they let me cherry-pick from his gear collection. Highlights include ALTEC speakers and a ReVox reel to reel. One thing about audio gear: a great-sounding system from the 60s or 70s, if it’s been maintained, still sounds great.
This was in response to Craig. Stupid comment system…
Having just looked at a “Crosley” blurtooth/record player a friend had been gifted with and not liking it’s sound with a known good record I can see nothing has changed since my youth. There is crap and then there is respectable stuff. Belt drive from a Dc motor that has 5 wires into it. 3 speed slide switch on deck as well as pitch knob the pitch seems unstable. Belt of dubious quality, if even slightly non uniform there will be wow.
Snake oil sells at all price points. I had to tell him it’s a piece of junk.
“blurtooth”
Well, that says it all!
B^)
What I find curious is that the audiophiles who are listening on systems that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of money-units are listening to recordings that were mixed and mastered on set ups that cost only a portion of that. But I suppose the seating in a mixing booth isn’t as comfortable.
I think you rather underestimate the cost of the recording studio setups… The building they are in has to be expensive beyond normal builds (which are not cheap either) to be noise isolating from the outside world, and the electronics have to be very low noise as well etc. That many of them were build decades ago even at the tail end of last millennium and have perhaps not even needed much in upgrades since doesn’t make them cheap. If you had to start from scratch for that quality of recording setup…
So while yes it is possible they are listening to a more garage band that doesn’t have hugely expensive recording setup for which you may be correct. I’d say its far from a given they are listening on more expensive equipment that it was created, mixed and mastered on. And even if they are I don’t have any objections to that – if they want to spend that extra money to going deep beyond the point of diminishing returns so what they listen to isn’t as coloured by their sound system – so they are really hearing the ‘intended’ sound, that is fine by me…
My 1906 Edison cylinder player is analog from start to finish with no nasty electronics between the performers and the listener. The sound is incredible!
Everything that came after is crap in comparison.
All that gear to listen to a stamped plastic pancake.
Didn’t read 100% of these comments but a lot. Firstly spending any amount of your own money on anything is great, much better than hoarding it as it gives employment to others and adds to the money-go-round. What is shocking is that nobody cares what the actual music is. Anybody even care about the emotions of the music? Listening deeply to music and it’s meaning is far more rewarding than getting to a perfect sound, which is, by the way, impossible. So stick to £50 Sony earbuds and spend time listening properly to the classics, the Beatles, genesis, pink Floyd, Adele or whoever. You will know what it’s for when it makes you cry and it won’t be because you have 0.0001% thd.
Not sure what these systems trying to preserve or achive. the moment the sound was recorded and processed, the sound is not original already and distorted. any efforts cant restore to the point before recording. all are just adding different tastes based on one’s liking/ taste or phyclogical requirement.
of course a bad system can top off more distortions, yet someone, not others still like them too.
its life, do what if you like if you have the means and legal. if you are powerful enough you can amend laws.
The documentary was this man’s ode to a life lived well. Auduo was his hobby and lifelong passion.