The Washington Post’s Geoff Edgers writes an elegy to the high-fidelity dream of Ken Fritz, who spent 27 years and $1 million to build a sound system in a suburban Richmond home that he had to enlarge to create a space whose acoustics lived up to the equipment.
His obsession cost him more than money: a divorce, the estrangement of a son and troubled relationships with his other children, who spent much of their youth as laborers on the project. “Nobody wanted to come to our house, because he wanted to put them to work,” his daughter told Edgers. “I think we went camping twice, never took vacation. It was just work, work, work.”
In 2018, two years after Fritz finally finished building “the world’s greatest stereo and listening room,” he was diagnosed with the fatal neurological disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). As the disease progressively weakened him, he had to use the sound system to play digital files from a iPad.
After he died in 2022, the family tried and failed to find a buyer for the house with the sound system intact. The equipment was auctioned off piece by piece, for a fraction of what Fritz spent to build it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fritz-greatest-stereo-auction-cost/
“One Man’s Dream,” Jeremy Bircher’s 2021 documentary on Fritz’s quest for ultimate sound:
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