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

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

2024-01-13 07:40:45

RICHMOND

Ken Fritz was years into his quest to construct the world’s best stereo when he realized it will 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 will take greater than what would come to be the crown jewel of his complete system: the $50,000 {custom} document participant, his “Frankentable,” nestled in a 1,500-pound base designed to thwart any needle-jarring vibrations and geared up with three completely different tone arms, every calibrated to coax a special sound from the identical slab of vinyl.

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

No, constructing the world’s best stereo would imply reworking the very area that surrounded it — and the lives of the individuals who dwelt there.

The light images inform the story of how the Fritz household helped him flip the lounge of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Highway in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into one thing of a live performance corridor — an setting 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 residence. In one other, his two boys pose subsequent to the huge 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 mirror the wear and tear and tear on the family, the hidden prices of his kids’s unpaid labor.

In 1989, Ken Fritz started to assemble the world’s best hi-fi. He accomplished the mission at his Richmond residence in 2016. Quickly after, he obtained a prognosis.
(Allie Caren/The Washington Submit)

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

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

He discovered simply the proper 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 will fulfill a need he may scarcely have imagined when he started his lifelong seek for the proper sound:

It could enable him to put a document on the turntable with out even lifting the disc.

Fritz shows a speaker at his residence in 2021. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)
A turntable in Fritz’s residence stereo system. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)
A component on one among Fritz’s stereo audio system. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

What’s the worth of the world’s best 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 superb pipe organ, it was the final symphony completed by the good French romantic composer.

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

Fritz laughed.

“You received’t get a no from me,” he stated.

The music builds slowly, lush strings answered by woodwinds, till the organ crashes into the combination and sparks a cascading piano dialogue that requires 4 palms. 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 bought us an auditory expertise like no different.

Simply decrease the needle, and an invisible 70-piece large 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 Highway 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 have been marketed for residence use, blowing open the closed really feel of the previous phonographs — and providing a newly prosperous nation a classy 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 trainer at his Milwaukee grade faculty arrange a turntable and audio system within the classroom. He was shocked by the fantastic thing about the classical music. However he was particularly thrilled by the sense of being on the reducing fringe of a brand new expertise.

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

You most likely know a Ken Fritz. Possibly you’re a bit of 1 your self. Affluent mid-century America produced a whole lot of Kens. The sort of people that gave their all to their hobbies — bowling, gardening, woodworking, stamp gathering — and refused to pay any person else to manifest their goals for them.

Like a whole lot of youngsters born to the youngsters of the Melancholy, Fritz absorbed his DIY ethos from the earlier technology. 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 found out the way to set up new piston rings. “He had by no means achieved that earlier than,” Fritz recalled. “However he was good sufficient to understand how.”

Cords join stereo gear in Fritz’s residence. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

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 previous automobile radio for residence 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 appeared just like the man on ‘Breaking Dangerous,’ just a bit, however smaller,” Fritz recalled. “I instructed 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 supplier. That earned him a reduction, although he nonetheless needed to work Saturdays to make up the remainder.

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

Fritz’s residence in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood. The household moved to the house within the mid-Seventies, and Fritz started engaged on his stereo system shortly after. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

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

Within the Eighties, Fritz launched his mission by blowing up the lounge right into a listening room, a 1,650-square-foot bump-out primarily based on the identical shoe field ratio, just below 2 to 1, that labored magic in live performance halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The concept 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 obtained his older son, Kurt, to assist pour the concrete flooring. Then he labored alongside a development crew to place up the 12-inch-thick partitions and the sound panels to line them.

To reduce 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 mission the upper-range sounds.

He purchased just a few of the elements ready-made from a retailer. Fritz and his audiophile pals believed it was idiotic to spend money on the sort of top-shelf gear 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 identify 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 through the years. “DIY, there’s no identify tags, no one is aware of nothing. And I assure you these will most likely sound 1,000,000 occasions 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 girl, is nineteen, 20, 21, they know what they’re going to do with their life,” he stated. “And for those who’re on that path and issues are being achieved to your satisfaction, it’s simple to maintain going to search for the following aim.”

Through the years, Fritz amassed a big document assortment. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)
Betsy Logan helps her father, Ken Fritz with paperwork having to do along with his stereo gear in June 2021. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

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

Within the light images taken as they labored alongside him, the 5 Fritz youngsters are providing pinched smiles, at finest.

“No person needed to return to our home, as a result of he needed to place them to work,” stated 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 exhausting work and focus. A tough-driving boss at his firm, he introduced the identical power to his after-hours passion, which he typically appeared to consider as everyone’s passion.

He may very well be brief. He held grudges. Dedicated to sound, he typically appeared to not pay attention.

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 children and crank up the TV to harass him.

Stereo elements in Fritz’s residence. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

After the divorce, she stopped ingesting and located a longtime associate. Fritz moved on as effectively, 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 guide. He wanted the space.

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t the dimensions of the ask. The document participant wasn’t value various 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 way in which he instructed me,” Fritz recalled later. “I instructed him: ‘Not going to occur.’”

It was previous 1 a.m. when Kurt, with just a few drinks in him, instructed his father he was going to remain up later and take heed 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 instructed his father. “Die gradual.”

His that means was coldly clear to each of them.

Just some months earlier than, Fritz had observed a weak point in his proper hand. The prognosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — the progressive and inevitably deadly neurological dysfunction often called ALS.

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

Quickly after Fritz completed constructing his stereo system, he was identified with ALS, a deadly neurological illness. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

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

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

“I can’t pay attention to those information anymore,” he instructed Sue.

“Properly, 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 concept. Deadly situation? Like all different hurdles on the trail to the world’s best stereo, he would merely attempt to out-engineer it.

His plan was ingenious. It could contain rigging the suction cups to safe a document 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 mission, he stopped. His neurological deterioration was accelerating. By the point he completed developing the machine, he realized, he wouldn’t even have the ability to take away a document from its sleeve.

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

As ALS robbed his physique of the power to maneuver, Fritz used a pill machine to play his music. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

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

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

“He positively taught me my work ethic,” Scott stated. “However I don’t must 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 buddy, Jeremy Bircher, drove to Virginia to make a documentary: “One Man’s Dream.”

The 58-minute movie opens with Fritz, moodily backlit at his document 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 instructed him about this story. Fritz, he argued, was the sort of obsessive who provides audiophiles a foul identify.

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

“This room/home should be listed in UNESCO World Heritage Listing. A lot ardour, soul and coronary heart!” wrote one of many hundreds of commenters.

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

Betsy Logan talks to her father, Ken Fritz, a few element of his stereo system. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

Sooner or later in April 2021, Fritz hosted a small listening celebration. Earlier than the pandemic, he incessantly invited all the Richmond Audio Society for sound and sandwiches. However on this present day, it was simply two of his closest audio-geek pals and me.

Ray Breakall, an expert piano tuner whose document 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 stated. “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 Demise 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,” stated 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 means slowly by means of a sandwich, reducing up the items sufficiently small to swallow. He appeared re-energized by the point they returned to the stereo.

“Right here’s a terrific rock track, and it will get your juices going,” Fritz instructed 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 take heed to the big 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 suppose?

However as Fritz cranked the loudest model of the Contours hit I’d ever heard, it was inconceivable to pay attention 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 marvel, 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 actually “wow?” Or merely loud?

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

He speculated that the Fritzes had most likely been watching a DVD within the listening room and by accident 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 buddy’s bodily decline.

“He can’t bear in mind half the time what he’s listening to and what he’s left on,” Mieckowski stated, 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 best stereo system would reside on with out him.

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

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

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

“Anyone that’s obtained that sort of cash,” Mieckowski stated, “doesn’t need to reside right here.”

Fritz’s document assortment encompassed the classical music he liked, in addition to music from different genres. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)
Fritz was a lover of classical music and bought a big assortment. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

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 “Completely satisfied Birthday.” He sat for a portrait and even had a small spoon of ice cream, as a lot as his constricted throat muscle mass may tolerate.

It was February of 2022. Six years after he had completed his life’s mission. 4 years after he was instructed 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 in a position to share his regrets about his model of fathering. However he had no regrets concerning the hours, weeks and years that he had dedicated to the world’s best stereo.

In some unspecified time in the future, Betsy flicked the ability 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 whole lot 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 ground 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. In the long run, 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, best want.

For a time, it appeared like an previous 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 patrons. They weren’t enthusiastic.

Adam Wexler, with the Brooklyn-based StereoBuyers, instructed her he may resell the Krells. The custom-designed gear could be rather a lot more durable.

“Hello-fi is extraordinarily subjective,” Wexler instructed 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 effort of buying these gigantic audio system that most likely wouldn’t slot in most individuals’s houses, even for those who may get them to their houses?”

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 a neighborhood 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 and marketing.

“We euphemistically confer with it because the ‘million-dollar, monumental, magical, musical masterpiece,’” stated David Staples, the proprietor of eBid Native. “It could be the very best, most elaborate and beautiful non-public residential audiophile system within the nation, maybe even on the planet.”

Lots of the information her father had spent a lifetime gathering had already been bought — and Betsy understood that the system itself would virtually actually be parceled out to a number of patrons as effectively.

So what, in the end, could be the worth of the world’s best 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 would like that most likely aren’t going to sound nearly 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 overall 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 stated, was no matter any person else was prepared to pay for it.

Fritz’s residence stereo system was a labor of affection. After his loss of life, regardless of his want that it stay intact, it was bought off piece by piece. (Matt McClain/The Washington Submit)

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