Ken Fritz constructed a $1 million stereo. The true value was unfathomable.

RICHMOND

Ken Fritz was years into his quest to construct the world’s biggest stereo when he realized it could take extra than simply gear.

It could take greater than the Krell amplifiers and the Ampex reel-to-reel. Greater than the trio of 10-foot audio system he envisioned crafting by hand.

And it could take greater than what would come to be the crown jewel of his complete system: the $50,000 {custom} report participant, his “Frankentable,” nestled in a 1,500-pound base designed to thwart any needle-jarring vibrations and geared up with three totally different tone arms, every calibrated to coax a unique sound from the identical slab of vinyl.

“If I play jazz, possibly that cartridge would possibly bloom just a little greater than the opposite two,” Fritz defined to me. “On classical, possibly this one.”

No, constructing the world’s biggest stereo would imply remodeling the very house that surrounded it — and the lives of the individuals who dwelt there.

The pale images inform the story of how the Fritz household helped him flip the lounge of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Street in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into one thing of a live performance corridor — an atmosphere exactly engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In a single snapshot, his three daughters maintain up new siding for his or her increasing house. In one other, his two boys pose subsequent to the large speaker shells. There’s the person of the home himself, a compact man with slicked-back hair and a skinny goatee, on the ground making changes to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a quantity that didn’t start to replicate the damage and tear on the family, the hidden prices of his youngsters’s unpaid labor.

“My dad had a workshop,” is how Rosemary, the youngest lady, now 56, places it. “We had been ceaselessly constructing, rebuilding.”

However for the ultimate flourish of his epic engineering venture, in 2020, Fritz would go it alone.

He discovered simply the fitting suction cups, 4 in whole and the proper dimension, from an organization in Germany. He ordered a small vacuum pump on-line.

It was hardly the Frankentable’s costliest enhancement, however it could fulfill a want he may scarcely have imagined when he started his lifelong seek for the proper sound:

It could enable him to position a report on the turntable with out even lifting the disc.

What’s the worth of the world’s biggest stereo? Quickly, everybody would know. However for now, simply hit play.

Camille Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3. It’s a favourite. Well-known for its wonderful pipe organ, it was the final symphony completed by the nice French romantic composer.

“Ought to we hear, Dad?” requested Betsy, 59, the oldest of Fritz’s 5 youngsters, and the one one up to assist stock his life’s work as his eightieth birthday approached.

Fritz laughed.

“You gained’t get a no from me,” he mentioned.

The music builds slowly, lush strings answered by woodwinds, till the organ crashes into the combo and sparks a cascading piano dialogue that requires 4 arms. Its fullness and energy washed over Fritz’s listening room.

He was a boy on the daybreak of the hi-fi revolution. This was 70 years in the past, lengthy earlier than holograms and digital realities tried to idiot our brains into seeing one thing that’s not there, when stereo first offered us an auditory expertise like no different.

Simply decrease the needle, and an invisible 70-piece massive band was transported into your lounge — or a whispering crooner would come to life on the sofa cushion beside you.

The trick, pioneered within the early Thirties by engineers working at Bell Labs in New York and Abbey Street Studios in London, was within the two channels of sound. Recorded from separate microphones and performed again by means of separate audio system, they may simulate the swirling heat and depth of life.

By the Fifties, the primary cumbersome hi-fis had been marketed for house use, blowing open the closed really feel of the outdated phonographs — and providing a newly prosperous nation a complicated new subject of connoisseurship to overcome. The Mantovani Orchestra or Rosemary Clooney, pouring out of the Klipschorns with the after-dinner martinis.

Sooner or later, Fritz’s instructor at his Milwaukee grade college arrange a turntable and audio system within the classroom. He was surprised by the fantastic thing about the classical music. However he was particularly thrilled by the sense of being on the chopping fringe of a brand new expertise.

Inside a few years, teenage Fritz had purchased his personal recording machine and began capturing the music of dwell bands. He began the Hello-Fi Membership at Bay View Excessive College and took a part-time job in an equipment retailer that offered audio gear. Together with his earnings, he picked up a Heathkit, one of many sizzling, new build-it-yourself amplifiers, for $49.

You in all probability know a Ken Fritz. Perhaps you’re a bit of 1 your self. Affluent mid-century America produced a number of Kens. The sort of people that gave their all to their hobbies — bowling, gardening, woodworking, stamp gathering — and refused to pay someone else to manifest their goals for them.

Like a number of children born to the youngsters of the Despair, Fritz absorbed his DIY ethos from the earlier era. When their ’51 Chevrolet broke down, Ken Fritz Sr. didn’t have the cash for a mechanic. So he took the engine aside himself and discovered set up new piston rings. “He had by no means carried out that earlier than,” Fritz recalled. “However he was sensible sufficient to understand how.”

At an audio present in 1957, Ken Jr. met Saul Marantz — an engineering legend on this burgeoning subject, who a decade earlier had been so pushed to transform an outdated automotive radio for house use that he took it aside and reconstructed it into a brand new invention, a preamplifier he dubbed the Audio Consolette. For a child like Fritz, it was higher than assembly Willie Mays.

“He seemed just like the man on ‘Breaking Unhealthy,’ just a bit, however smaller,” Fritz recalled. “I advised him I needed to purchase his amplifier. He knew I didn’t have the cash.”

Fritz persuaded his boss at an audio store to set Marantz up as a vendor. That earned him a reduction, although he nonetheless needed to work Saturdays to make up the remaining.

After faculty, he labored for a enterprise that made fiberglass molds and ultimately moved to Virginia. He began his personal firm there, settling into the household house on Hybla Street within the mid-’70s.

He added a workshop and ultimately constructed a swimming pool, one thing of a sop to his spouse, Judy, and their children, since he was too busy for journey or holidays. His firm consumed the times. His audio obsession stuffed the nights and weekends.

Within the Nineteen Eighties, Fritz launched his venture by blowing up the lounge right into a listening room, a 1,650-square-foot bump-out based mostly on the identical shoe field ratio, slightly below 2 to 1, that labored magic in live performance halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The thought was that the acoustic waves would equally roll off Fritz’s lengthy, cement-filled partitions and 17-foot-high, wood-paneled ceiling to wash the listener in music.

He received his older son, Kurt, to assist pour the concrete flooring. Then he labored alongside a building crew to place up the 12-inch-thick partitions and the sound panels to line them.

To attenuate hum and potential electrical interference, Fritz outfitted the room with its personal 200-amp electrical system and HVAC system, impartial from the remainder of the home.

He crafted by hand the three 10-foot audio system that loomed like alien monoliths on the head of the room, with the assistance of Paul Gibson, a former worker at his fiberglass firm. Every 1,400-pound slab pulsed with 24 cone drivers for the deeper tones and 40 tweeters — 30 capturing into the room, 10 towards the crimson curtains draping the wall behind — to venture the upper-range sounds.

He purchased only some of the elements ready-made from a retailer. Fritz and his audiophile buddies believed it was idiotic to put money into the sort of top-shelf tools that gleamed from the shiny pages of Excessive Constancy journal. Solely a home-crafted system may obtain the audio you desired.

“You’re going to spend $250,000 for the title model on the rack so everyone is available in and shall be impressed,” scoffed Mark Mieckowski, a retired electrician who had helped Fritz fine-tune his system over time. “DIY, there’s no title tags, no person is aware of nothing. And I assure you these will in all probability sound 1,000,000 instances higher.”

It was thrilling work. At night time, Fritz would lie in mattress and take into consideration the progress he had made that day and the duties that lay forward for the following.

“I firmly imagine that by the point an individual, man or lady, is nineteen, 20, 21, they know what they’re going to do with their life,” he mentioned. “And when you’re on that path and issues are being carried out to your satisfaction, it’s simple to maintain going to search for the following objective.”

Not everybody within the quickly metastasizing home on Hybla Street shared this pleasure.

Within the pale images taken as they labored alongside him, the 5 Fritz children are providing pinched smiles, at greatest.

“No person needed to return to our home, as a result of he needed to place them to work,” mentioned his daughter Patty, 58. “I feel we went tenting twice, by no means took trip. It was simply work, work, work.”

Fritz thought he was instructing them about arduous work and focus. A tough-driving boss at his firm, he introduced the identical power to his after-hours interest, which he typically appeared to consider as everyone’s interest.

He might be quick. He held grudges. Dedicated to sound, he typically appeared to not hear.

Judy drank an excessive amount of in these days. She additionally was unimpressed by her husband’s music. When he performed “Swan Lake,” she’d name it “Pig Pond” in entrance of the youngsters and crank up the TV to bother him.

After the divorce, she stopped ingesting and located a longtime associate. Fritz moved on as properly, discovering happiness with Sue, who labored on making molds at his firm; they married in 1995.

The most important pressure remained with older son Kurt, whom Fritz had as soon as hoped would take over his enterprise. However Kurt moved to New York for a job as a expertise advisor. He wanted the gap.

“Rising up, I needed to stand up at 6 within the morning to work,” Kurt, 55, mentioned. “I mainly was his slave.”

As he received older, Fritz typically puzzled if he may have made house inside his personal huge ambitions to think about different individuals’s targets and desires.

“I used to be a father just about in title,” Fritz advised me. “I used to be not a typical father or a typical husband.”

The large blowup with Kurt got here in 2018, about two years after Fritz had declared that, ultimately, the world’s biggest stereo and listening room was full. Kurt, on a go to house, determined to ask his father for a few household heirlooms: his grandfather’s 1955 Chevy and an outdated Rek-O-Kut turntable.

It wasn’t the scale of the ask. The report participant wasn’t value quite a lot of hundred {dollars}. However the tone of the demand set off Fritz. He heard in it a way of entitlement.

“It may have been a monkey wrench, the best way he advised me,” Fritz recalled later. “I advised him: ‘Not going to occur.’”

It was previous 1 a.m. when Kurt, with a couple of drinks in him, advised his father he was going to remain up later and hearken to some extra music. All of the work he had put into constructing that stereo system — pouring concrete, portray the partitions — now Kurt needed to get pleasure from it.

However Fritz hit the off swap on the Krells. And Kurt delivered the phrases the 2 of them may by no means come again from.

“I want you to die gradual, m—–f—–,” he advised his father. “Die gradual.”

His that means was coldly clear to each of them.

Only a few months earlier than, Fritz had seen a weak point in his proper hand. The prognosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — the progressive and inevitably deadly neurological dysfunction generally known as ALS.

That was it. Fritz referred to as his legal professional and disinherited Kurt.

His physician had defined the merciless actuality of Fritz’s illness. A small share of individuals go on to dwell years with ALS, persevering with to work and performance. However for many others, the transformation is speedy and devastating. Folks within the prime of life and well being are robbed of muscular management and ultimately the flexibility to talk, swallow and breathe.

For Fritz, there was preliminary hope, as he started therapy at Duke College Medical Middle in North Carolina and continued to remain on his ft, that his case would progress slowly. However sooner or later in 2020, he tried to make use of the Frankentable and located he couldn’t raise his arms.

“I can’t hear to those data anymore,” he advised Sue.

“Effectively, if you wish to sit down and inform me what you need to hear, I can put it on,” she replied.

However Fritz was not able to relinquish management over his creation. That sparked the suction-cup thought. Deadly situation? Like all different hurdles on the trail to the world’s biggest stereo, he would merely attempt to out-engineer it.

His plan was ingenious. It could contain rigging the suction cups to safe a report so he may shift it onto the turntable with a mere flip of a swap — a tiny gesture he felt assured his failing physique would nonetheless enable for some time.

However earlier than getting too deep into the venture, he stopped. His neurological deterioration was accelerating. By the point he completed setting up the machine, he realized, he wouldn’t even be capable of take away a report from its sleeve.

A pal in Texas mailed Fritz a tough drive full of 1000’s of songs, from Motown to Mozart. Now he may play music together with his iPad. It won’t have had the analog heat of a Shaded Canine vinyl urgent of Arthur Rubinstein enjoying Beethoven, however on the Fritz system, by means of these mighty audio system, it wasn’t half-bad.

His youthful son, Scott, 49, provided one other welcome distraction.

They, too, had clashed over time and infrequently stopped speaking. Scott didn’t like how his father typically handled individuals. There was the time that Fritz blew up when a pal didn’t return some borrowed microphones promptly and insisted Scott go retrieve them, although the person’s spouse had simply died. And Scott hated how his dad acted towards Kurt.

“He undoubtedly taught me my work ethic,” Scott mentioned. “However I don’t have to spend time with individuals who behave like that.”

Nonetheless, the 2 maintained a particular bond, Scott having adopted their shared ardour right into a profession as a sound engineer in Chicago. In 2018, he and a filmmaker pal, Jeremy Bircher, drove to Virginia to make a documentary: “One Man’s Dream.”

The 58-minute movie opens with Fritz, moodily backlit at his report cabinets, grazing a hand throughout the jacket spines earlier than touchdown on Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” In slow-motion close-ups, we see him press the disc to the turntable with a {custom} weight, decrease the needle of an Air Tight PC-1 cartridge to the spinning grooves and carry a glass of wine to the paisley wing chair within the heart of the Historic Williamsburg-meets-Victorian listening room. He faces these stalagmite audio system because the brass part collides with the swooning strings, taking all of it in with a mesmerized smile.

Some audio professionals discovered it insufferable.

“You’re mining the lunatic fringe,” Jonathan Weiss, the proprietor of Brooklyn-based high-end audio boutique OMA, warned me after I advised him about this story. Fritz, he argued, was the sort of obsessive who provides audiophiles a foul title.

However Steve Guttenberg, host of the favored Audiophiliac YouTube channel, shared the documentary together with his 240,000 subscribers, calling Fritz “one in every of a form.” It has now been seen greater than 1.9 million instances on YouTube.

“This room/home have to be listed in UNESCO World Heritage Checklist. A lot ardour, soul and coronary heart!” wrote one of many 1000’s of commenters.

“That is really one thing that must be conserved,” wrote one other, “as a reminiscence to this inspiring man.”

Sooner or later in April 2021, Fritz hosted a small listening occasion. Earlier than the pandemic, he steadily invited the complete Richmond Audio Society for sound and sandwiches. However on at the present time, it was simply two of his closest audio-geek buddies and me.

Ray Breakall, an expert piano tuner whose report assortment is break up between jazz and classical, remembered the primary time Fritz performed for him a Fifties recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Fritz Reiner conducting.

“It was virtually just like the orchestra was within the room,” Breakall mentioned. “That’s inconceivable if the room isn’t this dimension. Very scary and really practical.”

Mieckowski — the sound buddy whose tastes ran extra towards 5 Finger Dying Punch, a thrash-metal combo from Nevada, and who didn’t even personal a turntable — was there, too.

“I can flat-out say that is the very best system I’ve ever heard,” mentioned Mieckowski. “Interval.”

They talked extra concerning the room, Fritz sometimes piping in however extra typically sitting again and listening, seemingly worn out. Betsy put out deli meat and rolls, and Fritz labored his approach slowly by means of a sandwich, chopping up the items sufficiently small to swallow. He appeared re-energized by the point they returned to the stereo.

“Right here’s an ideal rock music, and it will get your juices going,” Fritz advised us.

He punched up “Do You Love Me,” the 1962 hit featured so prominently within the musical melodrama “Soiled Dancing.”

And right here it was, the inevitable second in each assembly with an audiophile, when the proud proprietor of the system in query presses play.

I had skilled it when Weiss invited me to the OMA showroom to hearken to the large horn audio system he sells for about $300,000 a pair; and after I sat within the cramped basement of veteran stereo-and-vinyl journalist Michael Fremer as he blasted the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” by means of his Wilson audio system.

All of them need to know: What do you assume?

However as Fritz cranked the loudest model of the Contours hit I’d ever heard, it was inconceivable to hear critically. Was the bass flabby or tight? Did the mids sound correct? What concerning the drums? The voice?

Fritz nodded, his eyes brightening. I discovered myself reflexively smiling, assembly his look with an expression of surprise, mouthing “wow.”

I used to be rooting for a person who had devoted his life to this method. I needed it to sound higher than another. Even when I actually couldn’t inform.

Was it really “wow?” Or merely loud?

I seen Mieckowski shake his head, involuntarily and virtually imperceptibly, as quickly because the music kicked in. He remained politely appreciative in entrance of his pal. However later, I adopted him out to his automotive, the place he confessed that, no, it sounded off that day.

He speculated that the Fritzes had in all probability been watching a DVD within the listening room and by chance left the audio system on film mode. A standard mistake. However the truth that Fritz may not detect an imperfection in a system he had spent years honing to his impossibly excessive requirements was a heartbreaking reminder of his pal’s bodily decline.

“He can’t bear in mind half the time what he’s listening to and what he’s left on,” Mieckowski mentioned, referring to the system’s smorgasbord of settings.

Three years earlier, in Scott’s documentary, Fritz had talked frankly about his situation, the restricted variety of years that remained for him and his hope that the world’s biggest stereo system would dwell on with out him.

“I’d hate like heck to see this room parted out,” he had mentioned. “That’s identical to breaking apart a dream.”

However on this night time, Mieckowski had a glimpse of the not-so-distant future. Fritz’s stereo system could as properly have been a load-bearing wall. His dream had been woven into the precise construction of his house. They had been nearly inseparable.

And who would need to purchase a stereo that value greater than the home?

“Anyone that’s received that sort of cash,” Mieckowski mentioned, “doesn’t need to dwell right here.”

They gathered within the listening room one final time. Ken Fritz was turning 80. His sons weren’t there. Kurt remained estranged. Scott couldn’t make it down from Chicago. However Fritz’s three daughters and their husbands got here and sang “Blissful Birthday.” He sat for a portrait and even had a small spoon of ice cream, as a lot as his constricted throat muscle tissues may tolerate.

It was February of 2022. Six years after he had completed his life’s venture. 4 years after he was advised he solely had a lot longer to get pleasure from it.

Betsy, whereas serving to him stock his assortment, had noticed how her hard-charging dad had softened. He was capable of share his regrets about his fashion of fathering. However he had no regrets concerning the hours, weeks and years that he had dedicated to the world’s biggest stereo.

Sooner or later, Betsy flicked the facility on the 35,000-watt amplifiers and placed on a number of Christmas songs. Fritz at all times most popular his booming classical works, however the vacation tunes labored as background music, since they nonetheless had the 10-foot tree and the garlands on the banister. And Fritz wasn’t making a number of musical selections anymore.

He was past the purpose the place music may make him really feel higher, particularly since he may not function the system himself.

In April, across the time Betsy organized to place a hospital mattress on the bottom flooring so Fritz may keep away from the steps, she additionally tried to dealer a peace.

Kurt referred to as and tried to speak to his father. Betsy urged him to take the decision. Fritz refused. Ultimately, they by no means spoke. On April 21, 2022, Fritz died.

After which it fell to Betsy to attempt to fulfill her father’s final, biggest want.

For a time, it seemed like an outdated audiophile pal of her father’s would purchase each the home and the system. However he and his spouse modified their minds.

Betsy talked to sellers about in search of different potential consumers. They weren’t enthusiastic.

Adam Wexler, with the Brooklyn-based StereoBuyers, advised her he may resell the Krells. The custom-designed tools could be quite a bit tougher.

“Hello-fi is extraordinarily subjective,” Wexler advised me later. “So this man constructed one thing that sounded good to him. How many individuals on the market are going to say, ‘These are the audio system for me’ — and undergo the trouble of buying these gigantic audio system that in all probability wouldn’t slot in most individuals’s properties, even when you may get them to their properties?”

Late final summer time, Betsy realized she needed to let go. One other couple needed to purchase the home — however not the stereo. She made a cope with an area on-line public sale website, eBid Native, to catalogue and promote her father’s life’s work.

These individuals knew nothing about concert-hall acoustics, setting the vertical monitoring angle or the magic of the proper “Swan Lake” recording. They knew advertising.

“We euphemistically seek advice from it because the ‘million-dollar, monumental, magical, musical masterpiece,’” mentioned David Staples, the proprietor of eBid Native. “It could be the very best, most elaborate and beautiful personal residential audiophile system within the nation, even perhaps on the planet.”

Lots of the data her father had spent a lifetime gathering had already been offered — and Betsy understood that the system itself would virtually actually be parceled out to a number of consumers as properly.

So what, finally, could be the worth of the world’s biggest stereo?

The public sale closed simply earlier than Thanksgiving.

The Frankentable? There have been 44 bids, the highest at a mere $19,750.

The ten-foot-tall audio system? After 18 bids, an Indiana man named Carlton Bale snagged all three for $10,100. Lower than you’d pay for a pair of Yamaha NS-5000 bookshelf audio system.

A fan of Fritz’s YouTube documentary, Bale had set out a few years in the past to construct what he imagined could be “the second-best loudspeaker on the planet” — till he heard concerning the Fritz public sale.

“I assumed, ‘Do I actually have the time to construct the audio system I need that in all probability aren’t going to sound pretty much as good as those Ken constructed?’” Bale just lately recalled, after driving to Virginia with a U-Haul to fetch them final month. The worth, he conceded, was “a steal. The discount of a lifetime.”

The entire take for the million-dollar stereo system, together with the audio system, the turntable, the handfuls of different elements from indifferent cones to the reel-to-reel decks? $156,800.

However maybe that was at all times going to be its destiny. Final summer time, when pressed concerning the worth of Ken Fritz’s life’s work, Staples had demurred.

The worth, the auctioneer mentioned, was no matter someone else was keen to pay for it.