This guys life is like a Rorschach test for frequent posters here. Some who think his obsession was justifiable, and liken him to creative artists who were obsessively driven…and the rest of us.
I could never justify this guy’s behavior as one would justify Da Vinci or Beethoven. Creative Artists in a separate category than bibliotheca, stamp collectors, art collectors, and audiophiles. Matching components and optimizing rooms, supposedly to optimize the reproduction of sounds created by someone else, is not comparable to creating those sounds in the first place. Book collecting, music collecting, bottle top collecting may be worthwhile hobbies in and of their own, but ultimately they are of less value than what is being collected in the first place. I would not have wanted to grow up or marry into that family.
Everyone who knows me thinks that my obsession with sound and music is over the top. My wife showed me the article on Fritz. I told her that the value of his life was to make people like me appear sane by way of comparison