They sold the family home, hence there was a firm deadline for removing (selling) the system, furniture, etc.
Ken Fritz article
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What was Ken's net worth any idea? I'm not sure what the hurry was to get rid of all the gear they should've taken more time. Can't believe some of his family members didn't want any of it? My grandfather collected certain items that were very rare and a lot of choice items were sold off fortunately some stuff was kept and I'm very grateful. |
It’s interesting how we all take away something different from Ken’s story, obviously shaped by our own unique life experiences. I doubt his kids ever wanted for anything, materially. Was their father absent during their formative years? It seems not. The kids complain of being ‘put to work on their father’s hobby’, what a nightmare that must’ve been, having a father who involved his family in a passion dear to his heart. I’d much rather have been left alone for hours playing video games. Resisting judgment is a challenge, especially when elements of entitlement and bitterness over being disinherited are apparent. The mention of alcohol contributing to family discord is also noteworthy. During the auction at Ken's house, I briefly met his daughter, who seemed genuinely pleasant. Ken's substantial efforts to assist her in cataloging and creating an inventory for the system, aiming to help his family find new homes for everything posthumously, challenges the notion of him being a bitter and spiteful individual. I was moved by Ken’s video and particularly his comments on wanting to keep the system together after his passing. Witnessing the sale process saddened me, reflecting the cycle of what comes from the earth eventually returning to it. |
@goodlistening64 thank You for all of your intelligent comments
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goodlistening64: It wouldn't surprise me if the chimes were working on only one of the clocks and the other three were silenced, probably because there is never perfect synchrony. Most modern chime clocks have this feature (and a feature to selectively silence the chimes at night). Mantel clocks have this and I suspect many long case clocks have the same. The question is why have a chiming clock at all in a personal concert hall, what Ken effectively built. It seems like a needless distraction and intrusive to the function of a listening space. All I can guess is that Ken liked them and didn't care about their noise. |
I answer when someone attack me...😊 He answered to my critic of his way to apply his "psychiatric" science on a dead person by saying a falsehood and calling me "antivaxx"... Stupid people had no argument save falsehood... I apologize to the OP and to all for being out of the thread matter...But i dont like when people condemn someone they dont even know because of an article and judge one the top scientist in the world, the first microbiologist in fact, as a fraud because they read it in a newspaper... I can erase my post ... I will do it right now... Done....😁
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The entire youtube video is Ken talking about him and his system. Numerous times during the video you hear grandfather clock chimes going off. And so the audiophile in me went into critical listening mode wondering if I could hear all four of them separately or whether or not he had them sequenced. Honestly, I think I may have heard quadrophonic chiming - for the first time! - and it was quite alarming, but I think you are right and it was just sensationalizing by WaPo and his divorce and estranged son sad story prose was sensationlized and did not happen and perhaps maybe produced by the underground pizza human snatchers. |
Anyone reading this post thread should probably visit the Ken Fritz virtual system. I spent some time reading through the comments mostly to read what he said.
His comments were very generous and detailed and took great interest communicating all he did. He liked to share what he was doing clearly. Reading these comments leaves me with a very positive feeling about this guy. He had a company he worked very very hard and was doing something he really really enjoyed. We should all be so lucky and talented to do what he did . He spent a lot of time on limiting devices to protect speakers during home theatre operation which is a new thing I've never heard of. And clearly he was very obsessed with creating speakers and purchasing a lot of drivers to do just that. I still find it hard to believe his speakers could not realize more when they were sold. At least he immortalized his work in a documentary. I'm sure just about everybody on this forum would have loved to spend time with this man. And this is where I fault the article. clearly the Washington Post was neglectful by sensationalizing some negative aspects a family relationships, and distorting this man's Legacy. |
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Do you know something about my life that I don't? How am I a hypocrite? The WP columnist, Geoff Edgers, is a superb journalist who frequently writes about music and starred in a documentary called "Do It Again", about his attempt to reunite The Kinks. It is on youtube. I have followed him for years at WaPo. Suggesting he merely "click baited" about Ken's system has no basis in truth. What is truth is that Ken was not a good father - clearly displayed narcissistic behavior - and wasted seven years of his life creating something that caused a breakup of his family. Yeah, maybe he wasted his children's inheritance on himself. Maybe he thought he deserved it. Maybe he had good intentions. But the results speak for themselves and Geoff Edgars is hardly the target for you to aim your arrow. Maybe mainstream media is the cause of your dismay?
That is not the correct passage you used. It is Luke 6:41, which states, "Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother's eye." |
@goodlistening64 As I read your comments, I thought wow…before you criticize the splinter in your neighbors eye, you should remove the timber in your own eye. I think the WP columnist knows that a ‘good news’ article doesn’t create nearly as many clicks as a deeply critical one. I’m thankful that no one has published a story about my life. |
I will never judge someone i dont know with a list of symptoms from the Handbook of psychiatric disorder... ( psychiatry is a drug based practice then study psychology with Jung and astrology to balance its limited view at least ) I will never judge someone i did not know anyway... What i know suggest an ordinary man with a great passion with all family problems many of us here goes through ... I am appalled by the way some disparage a human being reading an article... This say a lot ....Not about Fritz but about them....
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Ken was not a part of Audiogon because he could not have cared less of what others thought of him. I tend to believe that most who post here have learned something from interaction with others who have similar interests. If there is a lesson here to be learned from this article it is not to lose $800K on a lifetime dream of building something for yourself. And that was it. It was all about him and his system. His family grew tired of it, and it was a hard read because of that fact. Had he cared about others, he would have used that $800K to build a commercial sound room and system that others could have enjoyed and perhaps even could have made a profit.
So true. At the end of the youtube video, he states, "I'm Ken Fritz and I believe I built the best stereo system in the world." Maybe the WP author went off track because during the time it took for Ken to build it (5-years) his marriage fell apart and his son became estranged. Now that he and his system are gone, there are only hard feelings left. The long-lasting flaw of fulfilling your own dreams while blatantly discounting others. @deep_333
Isn't that the truth. As Ken stated, he used Krell amps with four balanced inputs for home theater. I use 4 speakers in my stereo setup and I can't mutter a word about that on this site without getting dissed by those that claim anything beyond two speakers is a transgression against somebody's god. @erik_squires
Sociopathy (Antisocial personality disorder) is triggered by a genetic element or environmental factors such as neglect and abuse. Sociopathy is not related to OCD. OCD is about having too much conscience (living with guilt). Sociopaths have too little; or none whatsoever! I don't make this stuff up. This is clinical data: Below are estimates of the prevalence of “Cluster B” personality disorders listed in the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5), according to various scientific papers.
All together, therefore, 6.25 to 17.7 percent of the adult population are sociopaths — people who could be diagnosed with antisocial, narcissistic, borderline or histrionic personality disorder, or psychopathy. |
Nothing of the sort... retired and with no more social contacts... And with no money to play with new toys... Being unsatisfied by my gear system ( even if my choices were good to begin with) I had no choices only to go homemade and studying acoustics by experiments... You cannot tune 100 resonators by ears in one month... You cannot modify your speakers on the spot and you cannot adress vibrations and resonance with no money on the spot and buy as some costly Townshend platform... You cannot solve some electrical grid problem on the spot too ... I was one year full time but few years many hours each week... My luck was having no money to really invest in audio and to buy ready made solution and then if not learning nothing learning way less because purchase dont imply acoustic understanding ... Now my system is ridiculously good for his price... Rest assured i own the best possible for this lowest cost ... It is my pride...😉😊 and rest assured i am not frustrated in a stopgap , but most people will not believe me on that...Most low cost system to begin with , are, if not horrible, not at all optimized ...Most people dont know what to do and anyway will not do it as modifying the speakers and the headphone design of what they just bought etc ... Audio is about being creative and learning not about price tags at all ... Which is better : my system under 1000 bucks rival more costlier system ... Mine is satisfying 😊i will make exception only for system in a designed acoustical room nothing else as Fritz or mike lavigne acoustically designed room ... I am in this level what i call : the minimal acoustical satisfaction threshold with my speakers system... For the headphone system i am near the maximal acoustical satisfaction threshold anyway ( out of the head holographic perception and timbre realism and deep bass ) ... Cost : under 1000 bucks... Beat me ! and good luck .... Every one has his own idea of acoustical perfection ; mine is the acoustical quality experience ratio related to the lowest possible price ... I am the "Fritz" of what may appear to some as the garbage audio products...😁😊 But trust me my gear choice is not garbage at all especially after optimization ... Most had no other way to improve what they have except buying... I improve it so much that i can live in ectasy with music...Yes this is possible, i am here to motivate those who cannot purchase anything costly... The fun is the creativity way more than buying....Fritz was creative ...I admire him for that...
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@decooney “Nobody wanted to come to our house, because he wanted to put them to work,” said his daughter Patty, 58. “I think we went camping twice, never took vacation. It was just work, work, work.” One's passion is another one's hell. @yesiam_a_pirate What does it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world but loses his own soul?" Going biblical? @mahgister "I was myself consumed by the fever to create my acoustic room 24 hours by day for at least one full year..." Were you a cloistered monk or just certifiable?
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Sociopathy gets overused and thrown around when a number of obsessive compulsive disorders could be used. OTOH, when is a hobby a disorder and not a lifestyle choice??
In any event, unless we are treating a person we should focus on boundaries, expectations and commitments before diagnosis. The former are far simpler and more useful. |
What an incredibly awful article. What was the purpose of doing this article? I Recall the details of the auction of the system and was horrified. How could his family not enlist the support of the audio community to take great care and do what this man wished to be done. The deficient and negatively biased article should have at least expanded upon some notable efforts that he made to system going beyond the turntable. He devoted his life to creating something that was truly remarkable and memorable and this article failed to capture the essence of what he tried to do. Tarnishing all he worked for was so inappropriate. Sure there deservedly was a need for attention to focus on his obsessive nature toward building the system and that would’ve been fair. And that would’ve been a nice thing to read about. But frankly I really didn’t enjoy reading the article and all the negativity. The end of this man’s life was incredibly sad and difficult. Most of us will probably be similarly treated during our final days. Nature is so unfriendly at times. I have to believe many facets of his system could’ve found their way into the home of someone who is involved in audio. There was so much to appreciate and learn from what this guy did.
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Is anyone else on this forum divorced? Is that evidence of mental illness? Ken owned his own business, and maybe that was one reason he didn’t take vacations. We don’t know if he took his profession as seriously as he did his sound system. At least 2 of his kids were featured in the article and video, so they apparently got along with him. A few select quotes from a writer are not enough to make any valid conclusions about someone. Has anyone else employed their kids to help them with projects, and had their kids remember that is was fun? We don’t have any information about how many friends he had and what they thought of him. It’s clear he liked building things, and that was part of his profession. From what I could see he enjoyed building his room, system and the grandfather clocks. Maybe doing it himself was more important than the final result. The article - oddly - made no effort at all to evaluate how good the sound quality was. Yet it was supposedly an article about creating the best sound system. It seemed to go off track and focus on flaws in his personal life. I’m glad no one is writing about me. But for all of us, no matter what we buy, build or collect, some day we will leave it all behind. |
I doubt Ken had antisocial PD. He had personality features possibly of some other PDs, but there isn't enough here to say more. Having a dysfunctional relationship with his older son is unfortunate, but not enough to make a diagnosis of anything. His son wanting a vintage car his grandfather owned and a vintage turntable as his only bequest is telling of not much, except that it was met with a smallness of spirit by someone who could have afforded to do better. The unsaid part may be bitterness over how unhappy his mother apparently was due to living in a home Ken dominated, but that is speculation. It is hard not to wonder whether he liked things more than people. He built a big sound system of his own design, choosing a big line array design and using his experience in commercial polymer molding to build it, filling in with extra low-end speakers and driving it with stacks of Krell amplifiers and separate crossovers. The video suggests he enjoyed it even if he realized it wasn't perfect: "you lie to yourself and tell yourself it sounds great." The grandfather clocks are an oddity, though. They aren't particularly great at timekeeping, they are delicate and cumbersome, and not anyone's idea of modern room accent. These weren't antique clocks which might make an interesting piece in a modern room, they looked like reproduction pieces. |
Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. Obviously, Ken did not care about the feelings of others. All the attributes are there of one who has a mental illness. Someone mentioned OCD, and that would be validated by his obsession and compulsiveness, but not his disregard for the feelings of others. That has to be explained and I find it unlikely he was bi-polar (which would explain his lack of empathy and sympathy for others), but the signs of a sociopath is evident. How mental illness manifests itself is tricky, and only recently (last 20 years) has it been tackled within the pharma industry to provide medical solutions for many of the mental illnesses that have inundated our society. Ken was of age that in his youth there was no treatment for these diseases. Back in those days, we called people who had such diseases "fidgety" or "excitable" and/or any number of adjectives that described being different. None of them were very kind. Having family members who are dealing with such diseases - most successfully! - I see many of the attributes in Ken that I have personally dealt with. I do not profess to be an expert on the subject, but the lack of empathy hits home and is a crushing emotion when your child does not care about what you ask of them. Certainly, the other way around - having a parent that is disinterested in their own offspring can be devastating. Ken's room and system has some oddities. He incorporated four of the exact same grandfather clocks into his room plan. His stereo setup had three speakers. His plan for extended bass had two other speakers instead of say, subwoofers. And subwoofers are the easiest DIY assignment. I am just pointing out that what he did was not what most of us here would do with a room like that. Sure, you may include some RCA dogs (nipper and chipper) but IMHO, no one on this forum has ever said, "Nice listening room, have you thought about adding a grandfather clock? Or four?". Hey, grandfather clocks may have nothing to do with mental illness, but four of them have something to do something that no one here can explain. I find it amusing how we view his system setup and immediately feel that it MUST have sounded heavenly. It is a visceral reaction. Perhaps confirmation bias because, well, a million dollar system HAS to sound good, right? But truth be told, it may not have sounded good. While I did not watch the youtube video in its entirety, what I read and saw of it, there was not one person who claimed it sounded great. Is that important? |
i will judge more harshly those who judge others too harsley than the passion of this man... I was myself consumed by the fever to create my acoustic room 24 hours by day for at least one full year... My wife thought i was crazy... Fritz taught us a lesson with his life and he succeedded his dream.... Our life impact go beyond ourself anyway , and most dont know why they are here ....
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Another writer could have taken a different approach to this story and - using the same facts - left us with a completely different set of conclusions. What stands out about it was that Ken was an audiophile. If he had put his time and money into building a boat it would have been an unpublished boat story. I would have been interested in knowing how good his system sounded.
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Nicely said. I think the exact same impulse motivating people to read the Rorschach test that this story presents also crops up in those debates about whether audio is "only about the music" or also about "the technology and sound." The answer is, of course, subjective but people like to argue it as if there was only one, objective answer. |
@goodlistening64 Wrote:
Sound Labs Majestic 945PX speakers are nine feet tall, just saying. Mike |
@onhwy61 …”The root cause was his personality and behavior.” +1 I agree. Really creative and hardworking people are frequently like this, Steve Jobs, James Camron. People around him must make choices. My father treated me poorly, so, as soon as I was 18 I ended our relationship. I also think he was pretty happy, but drove the people around him crazy. He was really successful at work and in his pursuit of audiophilia. Many men beat their wives and children, or leave and do not provide for them. You could grow up in many parts of the world and starve to death, be killed in war or genocide. He provided, and achieved his lifelong goals, and got to enjoy it for some years. |
There's a quote from Tolstoy about the uniqueness of unhappy families that probably applies to this man's life. I don't think his audiophile obsession was the source of his husband/1st wife or father/son problems. The root cause was his personality and behavior. He was an imperfect human and not everyone was willing to tolerate him. My takeaway from the article is that whatever anyone achieves will never survive. You could conquer half of the world and a few hundred year pass and it looks just like it did before you were born. Of course, you could always build a Great Pyramid. |
There's a "rule" somewhere that states "if you want expand some part of your life, it will pushback on others." I suppose we want to chime in and reveal our version of "the greater good", "a balanced life" and where to place our priorities. Sometimes it's difficult to separate narcissistic behaviors from efforts to improve the human condition for others. What may appear to be narcissistic at present, may in fact, prove to be a positive force for humanity years/centuries later. And, when the final "scorecard" is tallied, we may determine that the casualties (human or otherwise) were worth the price of admission for what transpired. The goal of "the world's greatest stereo" appears to be too narrow in scope to be impactful to a large number of people, The "balance sheet" doesn't produce a positive in the column of human interaction. IF this system (and room) would have been painstakingly disassembled (like a Frank Lloyd Wright designed building), reassembled in an appropriate venue, and preserved for millennium, then we might be having a different conversation. But, it appears we got to the end of the story, without a great deal of fanfare, or perseverance. |
We are rooted in something greater than ourselves and we play a game we choose to learn... We cannot even condemn ourselves , we can just realize the road we take is the wrong one or not ... Some said, even thinkers that we are not free in our choices...This is self contradictory claim; we are free to put a specific content in our thought and judge this content we created and choose it or not as from ourself or not at the end looking at this content accepting it or rejecting it ... Geometry teach freedom...This is why Plato love it so much... We can stay a divided realm or unite ourself to greater than us because what is greater than us is also "us" ... Truth is there to be loved before to be known and cannot be known before being loved... Wisdom pass over our limited knowledge... Fritz had learned and do his journey well as he planned it for himself and all of us... As a teaching ... as a work of love ... We can accept it or throw it off...We cannot judge him ... As for each one of us , his purpose in life was greater than himself..
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