Who are we to tell people what to do with their lives. If you're single, what difference does it make if you spend your days tinkering with tubes, planes, cars, etc?
jeff
@vinylkid58 The answer should have been obvious in my statement.......and I'm as much of a freedom-of-choice guy as anybody.
He could have spent much more of his time/money with his family and friends.....or helping out the local community.....or charity......or whatever.
Hobbies are fine and dandy, but when they elevate to this level it's not a good thing.
The results here prove my point. HIs family was estranged and they sold all of his beloved audio equipment for pennies on the dollar.
'Look for it in about twenty years at other estate sales.
Dave.
He could have spent much more of his time/money with his family and friends.....or helping out the local community.....or charity......or whatever.
Hobbies are fine and dandy, but when they elevate to this level it's not a good thing.
The results here prove my point. HIs family was estranged and they sold all of his beloved audio equipment for pennies on the dollar.
'Look for it in about twenty years at other estate sales.
Dave.
This can happen in all walks of life. The only difference here is someone picked up the story and it became a thing on the internet.
jeff
The labours put into his audio system amassed little in the way of monetary value, but brought him priceless enjoyment while he was alive.
Audio equipment is rarely an investment in the strictest sense, and a wise person is able to draw the distinction between a rack of slowly degrading gear and dividend ETFs. The stereo is not on the portfolio.
Audio equipment is rarely an investment in the strictest sense, and a wise person is able to draw the distinction between a rack of slowly degrading gear and dividend ETFs. The stereo is not on the portfolio.
I distinctly got the opposite impression.
In the documentary that his son made he seemed like someone who had to be "achieving" something all of the time, rather than the sort who would enjoy sitting quietly, alone, for hours at a stretch listening to records. My older brother and I are of those two contrary types. I can listen to records effectively all day and night and feel like it was time well spent. Dave can't listen to one side of a record without needing to talk or "do" something. His wife sings in the Church choir and he usually goes but it is torture for him. I, on the other hand, seek out as much of that kind of live music as I can find.
I am an inveterate "tweeker" of my system but I spend A LOT of time listening to it, in between tweeks. For me, my system is a route to the music. I didn't really get that impression from that guy. He didn't like Opera or Rock 'n Roll. I didn't see any evidence of an interest in Jazz -- he liked Swan Lake.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I certainly don't aspire to be like him. I recently lost my Mom at 102, she lived through the Great Depression and was in London during the Blitz in WW2, with the OSS. I had the habit of calling her every evening and towards the end almost every night she would say, woefully, "I didn't seem to get much accomplished today". My thought would be that she's 100 years old and has accomplished everything, what more does she need? A pleasant day would seem like an accomplishment to me, but not so much for her. I saw that same drive in Ken Fritz.
Pete
The way I see the story is about obsessions, compulsions and addictions.
Whether it be alcohol, nicotine, opioids, sugar, sex, screens, or our stereo system, there is usually an underlying drive that one may not aware of.
Recognising the problem is the first step to change, but unfortunately with addiction, recognition is not enough.
There is something in the human brain, the mesolimbic (reward) pathway that is responsible for pleasure. Reinforcement of it seems to encourage more want.
And the thing is that the brain doesn’t want the same thing over and over. It likes novelty!
(Seeing the Eiffel Tower again for the 2nd time, with your first love isn’t quite the same as the first time, and can never be replicated)
Now, as society, once we have something good, can we live without it?
Our whole modern society is addicted to electricity, and we can’t live without the fuels that make it…
Whether it be alcohol, nicotine, opioids, sugar, sex, screens, or our stereo system, there is usually an underlying drive that one may not aware of.
Recognising the problem is the first step to change, but unfortunately with addiction, recognition is not enough.
There is something in the human brain, the mesolimbic (reward) pathway that is responsible for pleasure. Reinforcement of it seems to encourage more want.
And the thing is that the brain doesn’t want the same thing over and over. It likes novelty!
(Seeing the Eiffel Tower again for the 2nd time, with your first love isn’t quite the same as the first time, and can never be replicated)
Now, as society, once we have something good, can we live without it?
Our whole modern society is addicted to electricity, and we can’t live without the fuels that make it…
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If you had even watched a minute of the video posted at the top of the thread you would see that these were not there in the original build The 3 pillars are the speakers you see playing in all the videos. Unless someone else knows we can only guess their purpose, maybe a last project he wanted to finish whilst he could still use his workshop? they were certainly not in the listening room at the point he talks about his diagnosis. And I am sure many people if they could would say 'fsck it I want to build a big JBL speaker before I die'. So I think you are a little harsh judging his knowledge based on a single photo.
There is a suggestion he made the clocks as well, or at least the cases.
I do wonder what will happen when Dick Burwen passes away. You can't move his speakers as they are structural. At least I think/hope he is still with us, must be in his 90s now.
I see that. Just coming up to speed on the change of sentiment around the man and his methods. The story seems to contrast that which made rounds years ago.
Remember seeing that 55 min documentary near 3 years ago when it came out, watched it again and it still is quite an amazing audiophile story, of all the things accomplished I think the frankenplayer got my attention, and would have loved to listen to those speakers, too.
At 47:27, and 55:00 too, he summed it up all there is to it, content and accomplished, just sorry about the Kurt story and just hope he got his deserved share in the end, but.. RIP Ken.
At 47:27, and 55:00 too, he summed it up all there is to it, content and accomplished, just sorry about the Kurt story and just hope he got his deserved share in the end, but.. RIP Ken.
Geez, there‘s only so much one can glean from a photo of an audio system In terms of how it actually sounds. Practically nothing, I’d opine. In fact, I suspect it sounded rather average. Is that being too harsh? Hope springs eternal and the best laid plans of mice 🐁 and men oft go awry.
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I think it''s fashionable to judge someone by a YouTube video and by "eyewitness accounts" of disgruntled people (without investigating the disgruntled voices making accusations to ascertain whether they have reasonable arguments), and, on this forum, to judge someone's work by what you'd build. [I've already calibrated myself to one or two individuals on this thread by their comments here.]
I watched all the YouTube video and went through the full list of auctioned items (twice) to avail myself of the available information (in addition to reading the negative press on his personal life about one of his sons). I can say (without doubt) that I do not have enough information to judge someone's life in this particular case.
What I suspect from watching the entirety of the YouTube video and looking again at his auctioned items...is that he clearly put his money where it counts in terms of sound quality--except his turntable). Quoting from someone that I do respect in this subject area, Floyd Toole, from his book Sound Reproduction, 3rd Ed., section 1.6 (pg. 16):
Being a musician myself by training and education and a trained and practicing engineer that's also an audio enthusiast, I can say that Mr. Fritz did much better than the average person that didn't spend a significant fraction of his/her life learning music firsthand through mastery of an instrument and in formal education. I've seen this many times in other frustrated individuals that desired to be musicians earlier in life but for one reason or another didn't become one.
What I think (Uncharacteristically, I think it apropos to weigh in with my initial viewpoint in this case):
I think that Mr. Fritz said it a couple of times: he wasn't building the system to sit and listen to it for the rest of his life. Instead, it was the challenge of building the addition to his house, the room details, and the learning of different approaches and how well they worked (including finding vendors/subcontractors to help get what he wanted - like it was a part of his business of Polymer Tooling (which he later mentioned that he closed and sold off the assets). I think that what he was doing had about as much to do with showing/teaching his offspring how to approach a large project to get what you want--and to do it in a way that makes best use of time to complete the individual tasks.
I also think the reason why so many people have weighed in on this subject is because Mr. Fritz was basically not limited in monetary resources in the same way that others on the audio forums are, and this bothers them. It doesn't bother me--he had the resources and he used them. Bully for him. He was chasing his bliss (like Joseph Campbell admonished his students and listeners). The fact that the end would come eventually didn't seem to be important--it was the process that he was after. It was the process he obviously loved. And he shared everything he did. How is that bad?
If I had the monetary resources on the order of what he laid on his project, I wouldn't do the room quite so ADDishly and would be taking acoustic and vibration measurements on models and mock-ups to see what was necessary to achieve 90-95% of perfection (something that I don't see that he did, but he might have). It's the engineer in me to only do what is effective, not to "go overboard on everything". I also wouldn't do it the way he did it with his loudspeakers and room. But that's just me and my background.
In many ways, Mr. Fritz reminds me of my own father in terms of his interests (building grandfather clock cases, building and acquiring stereo systems and loudspeakers [he built a DIY Klipschorn with PWK's guidance using grad student slave labor in the early 1950s] , etc., and his tendency to push for results at the cost of some discomfort to himself personally, as well as others. So I feel a degree of "phantom understanding" and familiarity. (My father once, while working as a assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at SMU, designed the first working self-biasing circuit for newly produced "silicon transistors" at nearby Geophysical Services Incorporated...the "Texas Instruments" division of which was developing them...after a phone call from a hitherto unknown to him individual--"Mr. Pat Haggerty" asking for help. This was in addition to a large bunch of other and even more interesting and profession-changing stuff he did. I learned a lot.)
So...to throw out judgments against the guy without walking a mile or two in his shoes I think is just bad manners--and a large mistake. He obvious got what he was after (except perhaps the results of his labor being kept in one place after he passed--but that didn't seem to be that important to him...reading between the lines).
Chris
I watched all the YouTube video and went through the full list of auctioned items (twice) to avail myself of the available information (in addition to reading the negative press on his personal life about one of his sons). I can say (without doubt) that I do not have enough information to judge someone's life in this particular case.
What I suspect from watching the entirety of the YouTube video and looking again at his auctioned items...is that he clearly put his money where it counts in terms of sound quality--except his turntable). Quoting from someone that I do respect in this subject area, Floyd Toole, from his book Sound Reproduction, 3rd Ed., section 1.6 (pg. 16):
Being a musician myself by training and education and a trained and practicing engineer that's also an audio enthusiast, I can say that Mr. Fritz did much better than the average person that didn't spend a significant fraction of his/her life learning music firsthand through mastery of an instrument and in formal education. I've seen this many times in other frustrated individuals that desired to be musicians earlier in life but for one reason or another didn't become one.
What I think (Uncharacteristically, I think it apropos to weigh in with my initial viewpoint in this case):
I think that Mr. Fritz said it a couple of times: he wasn't building the system to sit and listen to it for the rest of his life. Instead, it was the challenge of building the addition to his house, the room details, and the learning of different approaches and how well they worked (including finding vendors/subcontractors to help get what he wanted - like it was a part of his business of Polymer Tooling (which he later mentioned that he closed and sold off the assets). I think that what he was doing had about as much to do with showing/teaching his offspring how to approach a large project to get what you want--and to do it in a way that makes best use of time to complete the individual tasks.
I also think the reason why so many people have weighed in on this subject is because Mr. Fritz was basically not limited in monetary resources in the same way that others on the audio forums are, and this bothers them. It doesn't bother me--he had the resources and he used them. Bully for him. He was chasing his bliss (like Joseph Campbell admonished his students and listeners). The fact that the end would come eventually didn't seem to be important--it was the process that he was after. It was the process he obviously loved. And he shared everything he did. How is that bad?
If I had the monetary resources on the order of what he laid on his project, I wouldn't do the room quite so ADDishly and would be taking acoustic and vibration measurements on models and mock-ups to see what was necessary to achieve 90-95% of perfection (something that I don't see that he did, but he might have). It's the engineer in me to only do what is effective, not to "go overboard on everything". I also wouldn't do it the way he did it with his loudspeakers and room. But that's just me and my background.
In many ways, Mr. Fritz reminds me of my own father in terms of his interests (building grandfather clock cases, building and acquiring stereo systems and loudspeakers [he built a DIY Klipschorn with PWK's guidance using grad student slave labor in the early 1950s] , etc., and his tendency to push for results at the cost of some discomfort to himself personally, as well as others. So I feel a degree of "phantom understanding" and familiarity. (My father once, while working as a assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at SMU, designed the first working self-biasing circuit for newly produced "silicon transistors" at nearby Geophysical Services Incorporated...the "Texas Instruments" division of which was developing them...after a phone call from a hitherto unknown to him individual--"Mr. Pat Haggerty" asking for help. This was in addition to a large bunch of other and even more interesting and profession-changing stuff he did. I learned a lot.)
So...to throw out judgments against the guy without walking a mile or two in his shoes I think is just bad manners--and a large mistake. He obvious got what he was after (except perhaps the results of his labor being kept in one place after he passed--but that didn't seem to be that important to him...reading between the lines).
Chris
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