Ignoring the interpersonal drama in the article, there is a very valuable lesson that a lot of people need to hear about the value (or lack thereof) in customizing a system to fit your needs. I...
Ignoring the interpersonal drama in the article, there is a very valuable lesson that a lot of people need to hear about the value (or lack thereof) in customizing a system to fit your needs.
I have friends that enjoy customizing their cars. I don't fully understand what all they do to their cars, but they always excitedly tell me about how they have improved the power or made it sound better or done whatever else - and they tell me how much more valuable the car is because of it. However, every time they go to sell it, they get stuck in a big rut for a long time afterward because they run into the problem of Joe Buyer not caring about their customizations.
The cool exhaust system might sound really cool to you, but I wouldn't buy a car that woke up my kids or my neighbors when I get up early to go to work. The cool stereo that you added might sound great, but someone that primarily listens to podcasts will not care about the bass.
If you are going to put money and effort into customizing something to be your ideal, you need to accept that it is for you and not for anyone else.
"If you ever expect to sell" is where I disagree. That's how you get terrible home remodels that are hot on the market but impractical to live in. However, if you expect to sell in a realistically...
"If you ever expect to sell" is where I disagree. That's how you get terrible home remodels that are hot on the market but impractical to live in. However, if you expect to sell in a realistically finite timeframe, compromise (or market-optimize) away. Just know you're taking a risk if you don't move out in time and are stuck living there. This happened with the parents of a former girlfriend of mine. They had an absolutely nonsense bathroom remodel because they expected to sell within five years, but they still have the same Galaxy brain design at least 20 years later.
It's been about 10 years since I was last there, but it was a converted bedroom—don't know if they were the ones to convert it or merely the ones to "upgrade" it. The sibling comment about an...
It's been about 10 years since I was last there, but it was a converted bedroom—don't know if they were the ones to convert it or merely the ones to "upgrade" it. The sibling comment about an impractically large bathtub is on the right track, though their tub was not outrageously large. Instead, they were advised that it's better to have a separate bath and shower, thus resulting in a tiny shower in the corner. A slightly large combo bath+shower would've went a long way toward practicality. There was also a load of dead space in the room.
Yeah I’m struggling to think of a single design that would make something sell well but be impractical. Short of shoddy work that you expect to fall apart within a year.
Yeah I’m struggling to think of a single design that would make something sell well but be impractical. Short of shoddy work that you expect to fall apart within a year.
Giant tub up a couple of steps framed by windows? The kind of thing that seems luxurious when you walk into the room for the first time, but actually takes 5 million years and two full cycles of...
Giant tub up a couple of steps framed by windows? The kind of thing that seems luxurious when you walk into the room for the first time, but actually takes 5 million years and two full cycles of the hot water heater to fill so you never actually use it?
When I was shopping for a house in 2018, I could not believe how many homes had been ruined by fresh remodels that split reasonably sized, usable rooms, into multiple tiny bedrooms that could only...
When I was shopping for a house in 2018, I could not believe how many homes had been ruined by fresh remodels that split reasonably sized, usable rooms, into multiple tiny bedrooms that could only realistically fit a bed and a dresser.
Reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about writing documentation for your house for the next owners. One of the comments said they had set up an extensive iot home automation system with...
Reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about writing documentation for your house for the next owners.
One of the comments said they had set up an extensive iot home automation system with controllers in every room and a server. They wrote documentation for everything and created YouTube videos explaining how it works. They passed it all on to the new owner. Then two years later the house goes up for sale and the pictures show all the tech removed. And the YouTube videos with 0 views.
Like yeah, obviously that was going to happen. The next owners aren’t going to give a shit about some bespoke home automation system. That’s the first thing I’d rip out if I owned it.
I can't imagine not taking that. Sure it's going to be work but a regular light switch / wall outlet is a couple dollars instead of the couple dozen for the various networked components. Maybe if...
I can't imagine not taking that. Sure it's going to be work but a regular light switch / wall outlet is a couple dollars instead of the couple dozen for the various networked components. Maybe if they're downsizing or don't have the time/capability to do the work themselves anymore.
I have a decently sized z-wave network and a server running it and you can bet that's coming with me when I move. If nothing else it should be sold on to someone who's going to use it instead of being someone's garbage.
I'm guessing it was somewhat wired in. Have seen a few previous posts about putting raspberry pis and stuff inside the walls for some reason. Rather than just the battery powered wireless remotes...
I'm guessing it was somewhat wired in. Have seen a few previous posts about putting raspberry pis and stuff inside the walls for some reason. Rather than just the battery powered wireless remotes everyone else uses.
I spent the last few years automating my house to an extreme degree, but now I’m in the process of selling and moving. My agent wrote into the contract that all lights, fans, etc., will be...
I spent the last few years automating my house to an extreme degree, but now I’m in the process of selling and moving. My agent wrote into the contract that all lights, fans, etc., will be returned to stock before closing, because I know for a fact that no one would want to spend the time to understand my automations and the random .json and .yaml piecemeal extracted from across the web.
Amazon/google home interfaces and devices may be easily transferable, but home assistant servers are so incredibly unique and specifically catered. I can’t imagine thinking that someone would want to inherit the mess I created.
I knew about this dude, but had no idea he died, or that he apparently started a family in order to have a bunch of unpaid workers, lol. From an audio engineering standpoint, the "funny" thing is...
I knew about this dude, but had no idea he died, or that he apparently started a family in order to have a bunch of unpaid workers, lol.
From an audio engineering standpoint, the "funny" thing is that some of his ideas are outdated - it is likely that no matter how well implemented, some of the concepts used in his loudspeakers are too limited to create the best sound in the world. In particular, tall line arrays like this that are not at least curved (whether physically or acoustically - by delaying individual drivers) will always have unwanted comb filtering slightly messing up the frequency response. And there are now technologies to avoid it. The acoustic lenses he uses on his compression drivers also have downsides and aren't used anymore. A lot of things changed in the world of sound reproduction in the last 35 years.
That said, I'm sure it sounded great and it's true that if you want to have the best sound in the world, you pretty much have to build your (big enough) room around that (and choose the radiating pattern of your speakers round that too). It sounds and looks crazy, but I think it's likely that this particular decision was less of an overkill than many other purchasing decisions he made.
I think it's worth it to also mention the other guy who tried to build the best system in the world, which included underground concrete basshorns, and those may not have even been the weirdest part of his huge system. I have no idea about his family relations or his physical health, but he obviously has mental issues as at some point he started filling his website with crazy religious conspiracy theories written in huge bold colorful fonts.
One of my online friends developed what he calls the weirdness quotient. Namely, people who are outliers in one area often are outliers in many other facets. It’s not the conspiracy singularity,...
filled with colorful conspiracies … we tend to be strange people
One of my online friends developed what he calls the weirdness quotient. Namely, people who are outliers in one area often are outliers in many other facets. It’s not the conspiracy singularity, though it does have echoes. His primary evidence (at least until he can gather proper data) is multiple people with anecdotal stories that southpaws are disproportionately eccentric compared to right-handers.
This is probably my equivalent to the weirdness quotient. The wilder the font treatment, the wilder the conspiracy theories. Where there isn't rich text editing it's always unnecessary...
conspiracy theories written in huge bold colorful fonts
This is probably my equivalent to the weirdness quotient. The wilder the font treatment, the wilder the conspiracy theories. Where there isn't rich text editing it's always unnecessary capitalization. Whenever someone capitalizes random words it always throws up huge red flags for me. In my experience consistent unnecessary capitalization almost always indicates the conversation's about to turn to lizard people.
Geoff Edgers has written a numerous articles about the audiophile community's deep fascinations (read: obsessions) and its rifts. Here, Edgers profiles a man with a million dollar home hi-fi...
Geoff Edgers has written a numerous articles about the audiophile community's deep fascinations (read: obsessions) and its rifts. Here, Edgers profiles a man with a million dollar home hi-fi unable to cede control in his old age and the wedges he drove into his family life.
As a bit of an audiophile and a musician I have to be biased, but possibly not that much - I warn everyone who tries to get into hifi that it's possibly the most bullshit-filled snake-oil field...
The first $250 or so you spend on equipment will put you around 80% of the way to the highest quality you can perceive.
As a bit of an audiophile and a musician I have to be biased, but possibly not that much - I warn everyone who tries to get into hifi that it's possibly the most bullshit-filled snake-oil field after health supplements, and I build my loudspeakers instead of buying them. I will be talking about loudspeakers - there certainly is a ton of complete utter bullshit in the marketing of amplifiers, DACs and especially cables, but speakers are a different category, where rather large differences have been confirmed by rigorous blind tests.
That said, I really disagree with this unless we're talking purely about headphones, which is the cheapest way to get good sound, but it's really not the same experience. The very cheapest loudspeakers I know that offer what could be called actually good sound that doesn't have any big annoying flaws if used only for near-field listening in a reasonably small room cost 300 USD for a pair (active, so amp is included), but that's an exception and you might have to add at least 50 USD for a cheap chi-fi soundcard if you don't already have one (many built-in audio interfaces are decent nowadays, but it's still impractical to use 3,5mm jack -> XLR adapters and controlling volume in your OS).
And, IME, the difference between these speakers and a high quality cca 6k USD pair of speakers is still rather staggering for pretty much anyone who has some interest in music and doesn't have hearing loss. Some differences can be described as:
More bass. Lower, louder. Psychoacoustic studies agree that this is a big deal when assessing subjective quality and 300 USD speakers are not going to play low.
More linear frequency response in all directions - off-axis frequency response is crucial because you hear it through reflections, which make a major portion of the sound that you're hearing. This just makes everything sound much more natural and less like a speaker.
More dynamics. It really makes a lot of difference when a loudspeaker has significant headroom and can accurately reproduce dynamics of a live acoustic performance. This is not subtle, it's immediately audible because it makes listening at relatively higher volumes exciting instead of immediately fatiguing. This can be created with speakers that are not super expensive, but not with 300 USD, more like 1k (and again, it's an exception at that price and only exists with specific types of speaker designs that have other downsides).
Notice that there's no "less harmonic distortion" etc. It also makes a difference, but apart from the fact that harmonic distortion is one of the reasons why the 300 USD speakers sound horrible when driven to high volumes, it's the kind of difference that only trained ears immediately recognize. But the rest really is very audible.
I am someone with (high frequency) hearing loss and I must say that I was completely floored by how much of a difference adding a subwoofer made to my sound system. Aside from music sounding...
More bass. Lower, louder. Psychoacoustic studies agree that this is a big deal when assessing subjective quality and 300 USD speakers are not going to play low.
I am someone with (high frequency) hearing loss and I must say that I was completely floored by how much of a difference adding a subwoofer made to my sound system. Aside from music sounding better, I could suddenly understand what people were saying in most movies. Not Tenant.
Fascinating article. I don't claim to be an audiophile, but I did work as a part time audio engineer/soundman for a few decades in my 30's and 40's. This article piqued my interest when it...
Fascinating article. I don't claim to be an audiophile, but I did work as a part time audio engineer/soundman for a few decades in my 30's and 40's. This article piqued my interest when it mentioned Heathkits, as my father got me interested in audio tech when he built a Heathkit amp for us way back around 1970. It was pretty cool. The circuit boards and all the components came separately and then following a detailed set of instructions, he had to wire and solder it altogether. It sounded pretty decent considering it was relatively affordable.
Then the author mentioned Fritz setting up a Marantz dealer. That brought me back to 1983 when I bought a used Marantz 2225 amp (https://classicreceivers.com/marantz-2225), Marantz 6100 turntable and a pair of Yamaha NS 670 speakers for what was a princely sum for me in those days. I'm quite pleased to say that over 40 years later, not only do they all work perfectly but they sound as good as they ever did. I've had other systems in between, but they always end up failing in some way and I go back to the Marantz. When it comes to sound, quality components matters; my final 'old man' comment is that you kids with yer newfangled compressed digital streaming music have no idea what yer missin' when it comes to quality sound (shakes hand at sky)(coughs)(collapses back down into recliner)
I think I would've loved hearing Ken Fritz' system. Too bad it had to be broken up to sell it off but then, no one loves your custom stuff like you do.
Well I would... but in 10 years your streaming service will have been replaced by something else... Twice. But my Marantz will still be working the same as it did in 1983. With zero upgrades or...
Well I would... but in 10 years your streaming service will have been replaced by something else... Twice. But my Marantz will still be working the same as it did in 1983. With zero upgrades or payments needed ;)
I can't focus on the merits of his sound system because I'm caught up on how this man's passion made him so petty, oblivious, and disregarding of his family's feelings. What a selfish asshole. He...
I can't focus on the merits of his sound system because I'm caught up on how this man's passion made him so petty, oblivious, and disregarding of his family's feelings.
The biggest strain remained with older son Kurt, whom Fritz had once hoped would take over his business. But Kurt moved to New York for a job as a technology consultant. He needed the distance.
“Growing up, I had to get up at 6 in the morning to work,” Kurt, 55, said. “I basically was his slave.”
...
The big blowup with Kurt came in 2018... Kurt, on a visit home, decided to ask his father for a couple of family heirlooms: his grandfather’s 1955 Chevy and an old Rek-O-Kut turntable.
It wasn’t the size of the ask. The record player wasn’t worth more than a few hundred dollars. But the tone of the demand set off Fritz. He heard in it a sense of entitlement.
“It could have been a monkey wrench, the way he told me,” Fritz recalled later. “I told him: ‘Not going to happen.’”
It was past 1 a.m. when Kurt, with a few drinks in him, told his father he was going to stay up later and listen to some more music. All the work he had put into building that stereo system — pouring concrete, painting the walls — now Kurt wanted to enjoy it.
But Fritz hit the off switch on the Krells. And Kurt delivered the words the two of them could never come back from.
“I need you to die slow, m-----f-----,” he told his father. “Die slow.”
His meaning was coldly clear to both of them.
Just a few months before, Fritz had noticed a weakness in his right hand. The diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — the progressive and inevitably fatal neurological disorder known as ALS.
That was it. Fritz called his attorney and disinherited Kurt.
What a selfish asshole. He wouldn't even give his son something trivial or let him enjoy the fruits of his labor — and the nerve of being aghast about any "sense of entitlement" from his son considering he felt entitled to using him as a child laborer for years.
I hate to say it, but sometimes some people deserve their disease.
No doubt Fritz reads like a piece of work. But this is a pretty heavy handed assessment given all as know about the family is what was written in this one piece, no?
I hate to say it, but sometimes some people deserve their disease.
No doubt Fritz reads like a piece of work. But this is a pretty heavy handed assessment given all as know about the family is what was written in this one piece, no?
Innocent until proven guilty is for court cases, not individual opinions. Our standards of evidence should be higher than "looked bad in one article", but it's not necessary for us to wait for a...
Innocent until proven guilty is for court cases, not individual opinions. Our standards of evidence should be higher than "looked bad in one article", but it's not necessary for us to wait for a court case to be settled before we form an opinion about someone, or to refuse to form an opinion about someone because their sins are not criminal.
Maybe it's not productive, constructive, or healthful to form value judgments and personal opinions about people we have never met and whose actions have never affected and will never affect our...
Maybe it's not productive, constructive, or healthful to form value judgments and personal opinions about people we have never met and whose actions have never affected and will never affect our lives?
Eh, this guy won't affect my life, but me thinking he's terrible also wouldn't affect his. I don't think too much energy should go into it either way. It's a very low stakes proposition either...
Eh, this guy won't affect my life, but me thinking he's terrible also wouldn't affect his. I don't think too much energy should go into it either way. It's a very low stakes proposition either way.
Situations where the stakes are higher, like with politicians and people who can influence our lives, should have a higher standard of evidence, but we still shouldn't have to wait for a court case to form an opinion.
If I'm not mistaken, this is an common social trend among music collectors in general. For more, see this documentary short on Paul McWhinney; he sold his collection of 2.5 million records in...
Ignoring the interpersonal drama in the article, there is a very valuable lesson that a lot of people need to hear about the value (or lack thereof) in customizing a system to fit your needs.
I have friends that enjoy customizing their cars. I don't fully understand what all they do to their cars, but they always excitedly tell me about how they have improved the power or made it sound better or done whatever else - and they tell me how much more valuable the car is because of it. However, every time they go to sell it, they get stuck in a big rut for a long time afterward because they run into the problem of Joe Buyer not caring about their customizations.
The cool exhaust system might sound really cool to you, but I wouldn't buy a car that woke up my kids or my neighbors when I get up early to go to work. The cool stereo that you added might sound great, but someone that primarily listens to podcasts will not care about the bass.
If you are going to put money and effort into customizing something to be your ideal, you need to accept that it is for you and not for anyone else.
As it should be. Never pour in money to renovations that are for the benefit of some unspecified future buyer. It's your house, live in it.
Agreed. Short counterpoint: compromise a little if you can comfortably hit the overlap in that Venn diagram. If you ever expect to sell.
"If you ever expect to sell" is where I disagree. That's how you get terrible home remodels that are hot on the market but impractical to live in. However, if you expect to sell in a realistically finite timeframe, compromise (or market-optimize) away. Just know you're taking a risk if you don't move out in time and are stuck living there. This happened with the parents of a former girlfriend of mine. They had an absolutely nonsense bathroom remodel because they expected to sell within five years, but they still have the same Galaxy brain design at least 20 years later.
Wouldn't the point of something that will sell well be that it's easy, if perhaps boring, to live with? I'm very curious about this bathroom design.
It's been about 10 years since I was last there, but it was a converted bedroom—don't know if they were the ones to convert it or merely the ones to "upgrade" it. The sibling comment about an impractically large bathtub is on the right track, though their tub was not outrageously large. Instead, they were advised that it's better to have a separate bath and shower, thus resulting in a tiny shower in the corner. A slightly large combo bath+shower would've went a long way toward practicality. There was also a load of dead space in the room.
HA! Great point. I abjure my use of "ever"
Yeah I’m struggling to think of a single design that would make something sell well but be impractical. Short of shoddy work that you expect to fall apart within a year.
Giant tub up a couple of steps framed by windows? The kind of thing that seems luxurious when you walk into the room for the first time, but actually takes 5 million years and two full cycles of the hot water heater to fill so you never actually use it?
Well that's a dirty trick to pull on the people you're selling it to anyway. I don't feel any sympathy for someone who does something like that.
When I was shopping for a house in 2018, I could not believe how many homes had been ruined by fresh remodels that split reasonably sized, usable rooms, into multiple tiny bedrooms that could only realistically fit a bed and a dresser.
Reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about writing documentation for your house for the next owners.
One of the comments said they had set up an extensive iot home automation system with controllers in every room and a server. They wrote documentation for everything and created YouTube videos explaining how it works. They passed it all on to the new owner. Then two years later the house goes up for sale and the pictures show all the tech removed. And the YouTube videos with 0 views.
Like yeah, obviously that was going to happen. The next owners aren’t going to give a shit about some bespoke home automation system. That’s the first thing I’d rip out if I owned it.
I can't imagine not taking that. Sure it's going to be work but a regular light switch / wall outlet is a couple dollars instead of the couple dozen for the various networked components. Maybe if they're downsizing or don't have the time/capability to do the work themselves anymore.
I have a decently sized z-wave network and a server running it and you can bet that's coming with me when I move. If nothing else it should be sold on to someone who's going to use it instead of being someone's garbage.
I'm guessing it was somewhat wired in. Have seen a few previous posts about putting raspberry pis and stuff inside the walls for some reason. Rather than just the battery powered wireless remotes everyone else uses.
I spent the last few years automating my house to an extreme degree, but now I’m in the process of selling and moving. My agent wrote into the contract that all lights, fans, etc., will be returned to stock before closing, because I know for a fact that no one would want to spend the time to understand my automations and the random .json and .yaml piecemeal extracted from across the web.
Amazon/google home interfaces and devices may be easily transferable, but home assistant servers are so incredibly unique and specifically catered. I can’t imagine thinking that someone would want to inherit the mess I created.
I knew about this dude, but had no idea he died, or that he apparently started a family in order to have a bunch of unpaid workers, lol.
From an audio engineering standpoint, the "funny" thing is that some of his ideas are outdated - it is likely that no matter how well implemented, some of the concepts used in his loudspeakers are too limited to create the best sound in the world. In particular, tall line arrays like this that are not at least curved (whether physically or acoustically - by delaying individual drivers) will always have unwanted comb filtering slightly messing up the frequency response. And there are now technologies to avoid it. The acoustic lenses he uses on his compression drivers also have downsides and aren't used anymore. A lot of things changed in the world of sound reproduction in the last 35 years.
That said, I'm sure it sounded great and it's true that if you want to have the best sound in the world, you pretty much have to build your (big enough) room around that (and choose the radiating pattern of your speakers round that too). It sounds and looks crazy, but I think it's likely that this particular decision was less of an overkill than many other purchasing decisions he made.
I think it's worth it to also mention the other guy who tried to build the best system in the world, which included underground concrete basshorns, and those may not have even been the weirdest part of his huge system. I have no idea about his family relations or his physical health, but he obviously has mental issues as at some point he started filling his website with crazy religious conspiracy theories written in huge bold colorful fonts.
We tend to be slightly strange people sometimes.
One of my online friends developed what he calls the weirdness quotient. Namely, people who are outliers in one area often are outliers in many other facets. It’s not the conspiracy singularity, though it does have echoes. His primary evidence (at least until he can gather proper data) is multiple people with anecdotal stories that southpaws are disproportionately eccentric compared to right-handers.
This is probably my equivalent to the weirdness quotient. The wilder the font treatment, the wilder the conspiracy theories. Where there isn't rich text editing it's always unnecessary capitalization. Whenever someone capitalizes random words it always throws up huge red flags for me. In my experience consistent unnecessary capitalization almost always indicates the conversation's about to turn to lizard people.
Geoff Edgers has written a numerous articles about the audiophile community's deep fascinations (read: obsessions) and its rifts. Here, Edgers profiles a man with a million dollar home hi-fi unable to cede control in his old age and the wedges he drove into his family life.
As a bit of an audiophile and a musician I have to be biased, but possibly not that much - I warn everyone who tries to get into hifi that it's possibly the most bullshit-filled snake-oil field after health supplements, and I build my loudspeakers instead of buying them. I will be talking about loudspeakers - there certainly is a ton of complete utter bullshit in the marketing of amplifiers, DACs and especially cables, but speakers are a different category, where rather large differences have been confirmed by rigorous blind tests.
That said, I really disagree with this unless we're talking purely about headphones, which is the cheapest way to get good sound, but it's really not the same experience. The very cheapest loudspeakers I know that offer what could be called actually good sound that doesn't have any big annoying flaws if used only for near-field listening in a reasonably small room cost 300 USD for a pair (active, so amp is included), but that's an exception and you might have to add at least 50 USD for a cheap chi-fi soundcard if you don't already have one (many built-in audio interfaces are decent nowadays, but it's still impractical to use 3,5mm jack -> XLR adapters and controlling volume in your OS).
And, IME, the difference between these speakers and a high quality cca 6k USD pair of speakers is still rather staggering for pretty much anyone who has some interest in music and doesn't have hearing loss. Some differences can be described as:
Notice that there's no "less harmonic distortion" etc. It also makes a difference, but apart from the fact that harmonic distortion is one of the reasons why the 300 USD speakers sound horrible when driven to high volumes, it's the kind of difference that only trained ears immediately recognize. But the rest really is very audible.
I am someone with (high frequency) hearing loss and I must say that I was completely floored by how much of a difference adding a subwoofer made to my sound system. Aside from music sounding better, I could suddenly understand what people were saying in most movies. Not Tenant.
That is not the claim I was replying to though. All hifi is a luxury. And believe me, I know very well how much absolute bullshit is being sold.
Interesting read, thanks.
Brings me back to the old adage: Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Fascinating article. I don't claim to be an audiophile, but I did work as a part time audio engineer/soundman for a few decades in my 30's and 40's. This article piqued my interest when it mentioned Heathkits, as my father got me interested in audio tech when he built a Heathkit amp for us way back around 1970. It was pretty cool. The circuit boards and all the components came separately and then following a detailed set of instructions, he had to wire and solder it altogether. It sounded pretty decent considering it was relatively affordable.
Then the author mentioned Fritz setting up a Marantz dealer. That brought me back to 1983 when I bought a used Marantz 2225 amp (https://classicreceivers.com/marantz-2225), Marantz 6100 turntable and a pair of Yamaha NS 670 speakers for what was a princely sum for me in those days. I'm quite pleased to say that over 40 years later, not only do they all work perfectly but they sound as good as they ever did. I've had other systems in between, but they always end up failing in some way and I go back to the Marantz. When it comes to sound, quality components matters; my final 'old man' comment is that you kids with yer newfangled compressed digital streaming music have no idea what yer missin' when it comes to quality sound (shakes hand at sky)(coughs)(collapses back down into recliner)
I think I would've loved hearing Ken Fritz' system. Too bad it had to be broken up to sell it off but then, no one loves your custom stuff like you do.
Join us yongsters on the new wave of streaming uncompressed CD-quality-or-better and running DSP filters :)
Well I would... but in 10 years your streaming service will have been replaced by something else... Twice. But my Marantz will still be working the same as it did in 1983. With zero upgrades or payments needed ;)
I can't focus on the merits of his sound system because I'm caught up on how this man's passion made him so petty, oblivious, and disregarding of his family's feelings.
What a selfish asshole. He wouldn't even give his son something trivial or let him enjoy the fruits of his labor — and the nerve of being aghast about any "sense of entitlement" from his son considering he felt entitled to using him as a child laborer for years.
I hate to say it, but sometimes some people deserve their disease.
No doubt Fritz reads like a piece of work. But this is a pretty heavy handed assessment given all as know about the family is what was written in this one piece, no?
Innocent until proven guilty is for court cases, not individual opinions. Our standards of evidence should be higher than "looked bad in one article", but it's not necessary for us to wait for a court case to be settled before we form an opinion about someone, or to refuse to form an opinion about someone because their sins are not criminal.
Maybe it's not productive, constructive, or healthful to form value judgments and personal opinions about people we have never met and whose actions have never affected and will never affect our lives?
Eh, this guy won't affect my life, but me thinking he's terrible also wouldn't affect his. I don't think too much energy should go into it either way. It's a very low stakes proposition either way.
Situations where the stakes are higher, like with politicians and people who can influence our lives, should have a higher standard of evidence, but we still shouldn't have to wait for a court case to form an opinion.
If I'm not mistaken, this is an common social trend among music collectors in general. For more, see this documentary short on Paul McWhinney; he sold his collection of 2.5 million records in 2013. https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/09/10/trying-to-sell-the-worlds-largest-record-collection/