What Price Perfection?

The late Ken Fritz discusses his legendary audio system, from the YouTube video One Man’s Dream

When Ken Fritz died, many people wondered what would become of his stereo system. Fritz’s rig was the stuff of legend. The audiophile from Chesterfield, Virginia, had built much of it with his own hands, including line-array speakers too tall to fit in most people’s homes. They took 5400 hours to complete and were appraised at more than $200,000. He also designed and built a three-arm turntable that sat on a unique 1500lb antivibration platform. Fritz felt that his “Frankentable” rivaled or bested record players costing well into six figures.

That was just the beginning. In the 1980s, when he started dreaming about building “the best stereo system in the world,” Fritz decided he’d need a room to match, so he built that, too, using a celebrated concert hall in Osaka, Japan, as a virtual blueprint. With frequent help from his children and a few friends, he transformed the living room of his family’s split-level suburban ranch into a 55′ × 30′ music space with a ceiling that varied between 12′ and 17′ tall. 24,000 cubic feet of acoustic splendidness.

Few of us would know about Ken Fritz’s single-minded pursuit if it weren’t for the 58-minute film his son Scott, an audio engineer in Chicago, made in 2018. One Man’s Dream, Scott called it—a title that subtly removed himself and the rest of the family from his dad’s obsession. The video racked up two million views on YouTube (footnote 1).

When I watched it a few years back, Fritz’s monomaniacal devotion to superb sound impressed me, but I was also struck by his rigid adherence to symmetry, which sometimes seemed to come at the expense of the room acoustics he’d worked so hard to perfect. Against the front wall of his majestic listening space stood two identical grandfather clocks. Like the pair of foot-tall ceramic Nipper dogs, they were carefully placed so that each long side of the room mirrored the other. A telltale fact I noticed was that the ticking clocks’ pendulums swung back and forth in unison, the end points of their sweeps perfectly synchronized. This was the room of a man who was no stranger to OCD-like excess.

One Man’s Dream also gave viewers an offhand glimpse into Fritz Sr.’s darkening future. He’d just been diagnosed with ALS, an incurable neurodegenerative disease that slowly robs patients of muscle control. By 2020, Fritz had difficulty talking and swallowing. Soon, he no longer had the fine motor skills to handle his 28,000 vinyl records or his multiple tonearms. An iPad with Roon still let him pick music and listen—for a while. In April 2022, shortly after his 80th birthday, Ken Fritz passed away.

I’d love to say, “But his system lives on.” Fritz said many times that he wanted it to stay intact. His family tried to find a buyer for the collection of equipment, bundled with the house if need be. No takers emerged. So last fall, an online-auction company catalogued the turntables, the speakers, the many Krell amps and crossovers and various bits and bobs, and sold them all piecemeal (footnote 2). The Frankentable went for just under 20 grand. The speakers fetched $10,100. All day long on November 30, buyers carted off their new possessions in U-Haul trucks after collectively forking over $156,800. Fritz’s system, said to have cost a million dollars, scattered to the winds.

It seemed like a sobering enough tale. A friend of mine quoted Ozymandias, Percy Shelley’s famous poem about how fate and the ravages of time lay waste to ambition and hubris. (“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”)

But the complete Fritz saga hadn’t been told yet. This past January, the Washington Post published a front-page profile (footnote 3) of the man that set the audiophile world abuzz. Although the article, by Geoff Edgers, one of the paper’s best reporters, was far from unsympathetic, some saw it as a hit piece. Fritz’s life no longer seemed the stuff of somber 19th century sonnets. Greek tragedy might be more like it.

Edgers, who knew Fritz personally and had taken notes for years, calls the reputed million-dollar price tag of the vaunted stereo system “a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.”

The article details how Fritz often treated his family as an afterthought—a distant third priority after his successful fiberglass-molds business and his precious listening room. Vacations were a rarity for the Fritz clan. To his credit, he belatedly understood that he’d made some doubtful choices, as he told Edgers. “I was a father pretty much in name. I wasn’t a typical father or a typical husband.”

Adding to the exposition of family turmoil was the description of a first wife said to drink too much and to be dismissive of her husband’s passions. When he played Swan Lake, his favorite piece, she called it “Pig Pond” in front of the kids and cranked up the TV to annoy him. The marriage ended in divorce.

Meanwhile, Ken sometimes dragged his young sons out of bed at 6am to work on the stereo project. “I was basically his slave,” Kurt, the oldest child, told Edgers.

Years later, after the ALS diagnosis, Kurt and Ken had a horrible falling out, the Post article said. It focused on a couple of relatively modest family possessions Kurt wanted, including an old Rek-O-Kut turntable. The son also took offense at his dad’s reluctance to share the fruits of their collective labor with him when he visited the magnificent room and stereo. Kurt thought Ken was being selfish and miserly. Ken felt Kurt acted arrogant and entitled. After a few drinks, Kurt said something from which neither man could recover. According to the Post, he told his father, “I need you to die slow, motherfucker. Die slow.”

Ken called his lawyer and disinherited his son. Four years later, his daughter Betsy pleaded with her dying father to take a phone call from Kurt that might have eased the men’s mutual guilt. Stubborn till the end, Ken refused.

In the 3500+ comments appended to the Post story, many went beyond pointing out that Fritz’s passion came at the expense of his family. Some commenters went so far as to claim that Fritz wasted his life. That’s a judgment he probably didn’t deserve, as we’ll see.

The last part of the Ken Fritz chronicle will appear in the June 2024 issue’s My Back Pages.

Footnote 1: See youtube.com/@kenfritz3813.

Footnote 2: See shorturl.at/rxJVW.

Footnote 3: See shorturl.at/ilvyJ.

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