Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile’s dream — “the world’s greatest hi-fi”.
What would it mean in the end?
Geoff Edgers has written a highly entertaining story about an extremely misguided audiophile who went “searching for perfect sound” in ways that practically guaranteed he would never find it.
There are a number of lessons to be learned from this fellow’s mistakes.
Just to take one obvious example, this picture of some of the records in his collection speaks volumes, at least it does to me.
He built a million dollar stereo to play records like these?
No amount of money spent on equipment can make most of these titles sound good, and failure to appreciate that fact is just one of the many fatal errors the late Mr. Fritz made in his approach to both records and audio.
He mistakenly thought he was at the “I know everything” stage, but that is just the prelude to the stages of knowledge where real understanding and progress begin, not end.
My own stereo history may be of some value in helping to shed light on these issues. Like everyone else, I started at the bottom. Thank god I didn’t have a million dollars to waste back then because I clearly didn’t understand audio any better than the late Mr. Fritz did.
Like him and practically every audiophile I’ve ever come in contact with, I sure thought I did. Having suffered myself from a serious case of pretentious-knowledge syndrome, it’s easy for me to spot the signs in others. (My understanding is that you can’t sign up on the Hoffman Forum without first proving your know-it-all bona fides.)
Why So Uncomfortable?
In a recent letter I received about the Dynavector 17dx cartridge we use, this question was posed:
Why is it that audiophiles are so uncomfortable with the idea that they might be wrong? I mean, you can’t improve if you think you are already right.
I answered as follows:
I was no different back when I started. For about my first ten years in high-end audio, roughly 1975-85, I bought the most expensive equipment that I could afford, as long as it sounded good to me and was well-liked by those whose ears I trusted.
Is the audiophile of today doing anything different?
What would you be doing if you hadn’t stumbled on a guy with some credibility — he sold you some records that sounded amazing, so he must know something — who turned you on to some audio stuff that sounds great and, better yet, didn’t cost that much?
And how did this guy — me — come to find out about all this stuff in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you.
He had a good audio friend who turned him on to Dynavector cartridges twenty years ago (but oddly enough not the really good one they sell. I had to make that leap for myself).
And this audio friend had learned through extensive trial and error that there were certain receivers one could pick up for cheap at thrift stores that offered excellent, audiophile-quality sound. (Trial and error were his forte. This is the same guy that clued me into the concept of Hot Stampers, a life-changing concept if ever there was one.)
As it turned out, even my friend did not know how good the sound of the receiver he sold me could be when fed by a top quality outboard phono stage, something he did not have access to. (The receiver’s phono stage is decent but hopelessly outclassed by the EAR 324p we use.)
I ended up buying four or five different models with mediocre-at-best sound before I realized the one I owned must be a fluke. Then I bought three more of the model I liked and they all sounded different too, although they ranged in sound at most from excellent to crazy good. So I put the best sounding one in my system and kept the other three for backup. Like I said, they were cheap.
When I met my friend George Louis in San Diego back in the 80s, he had a much better system than I did. He was using non-audiophile-approved equipment that drove custom speakers. He showed me that my audiophile electronics and my Fulton so-called state-of-the-art speakers were not nearly as good as I thought they were. What did I know back then? Not as much as I thought I did, that’s for damn sure.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1987, I met a fellow audiophile named Robert Pincus and we quickly became friends. I was selling vintage classical records to audiophiles (along with lots of other records) and he was supplying me with whatever Shaded Dogs, Mercs, Londons, EMIs and such that he could dig up with top quality sound and surfaces.
He showed me that no two records sound the same, and even that often two sides of the same record don’t sound the same. Once I had a chance to listen to some of the “Hot Stamper” pressings he brought me, I was sold.