Thread: The Real Cost of a $1 million Stereo

Originally Posted by nicoff

Here is an article about an audiophile. I remember watching a You-Tube video about this guy. But what the video did not show was the family tragedy behind it all. Someone said in the article that this is the case of obsessive fellow who gives audiophiles a bad name.

He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable.

I would love to read the article, but I do not want to subscribe to read it.

Originally Posted by Randy Myers

I would love to read the article, but I do not want to subscribe to read it.

Go to msn.com and click on "news." The story was there yesterday and might still be there.

I was talking to Florian about this guy today. What a sad family story.


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Nick Doshi introduced me to Ken back in 2018. I and a couple of local friends each have Ampex ATR-102's tape recorders (I have two and they have one each). Ken was interested in selling various spare parts that we were collectively interested in buying. I had several long phone conversations with him about his system, quite amazing descriptions whose pictures I only saw as the audiophile sites did posts a few years later, and how he had gained the different Ampex ATR-102's and multiple spare parts. He was interested in selling a bunch of the spare parts and one of his machines. We put together a list and a bid and sent it to him. Not a low ball offer, but definitely also not at retail. He said he would look at the closely and would get back to me. All our conversations were very friendly and long. So I was very surprised that I never heard back from Ken in the fall of 2018. I didn't follow up, thinking that maybe Ken changed his mind. None of the parts we had listed were crucial, just nice to haves. Later, I found out that Ken's eventually fatal disease was disclosed to him almost exactly the time he stopped communicating with me.

Larry

I saw the video on his system a few years ago. It was (ahem) a bit more positive than this article. It’s a shame how badly he treated his family. Nobody gets out alive but what a sad end to his story.

When a hobby becomes an obsession. Such a sad story.

Originally Posted by nicoff

Yes, food for thought.

an there's always 2 sides to every story, sometimes 3

Originally Posted by Porsche

an there's always 2 sides to every story, sometimes 3

His family all told the same story.

Well lets look on the Bright side, if he started his journey today , he would have a DAC , Server and some cables for a Million Bucks

Fritz could have used some astronomy to accompany his audiophilia. I always think of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot when thinking of the importance of family, conflict with those close to us, our priorities/agendas, and our short existence in the universe.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

pale-blue-dot.png

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12ft