As the music industry evolves and transforms, every year brings a wave of new trends, sounds, and artists that captivate audiences. 2024 is set to be no different, with a plethora of fresh faces and innovations on the horizon. Here are some of the top music predictions for the upcoming year:
The Rise of Gen Z Artists
As Gen Z continues to emerge as a driving force in the music industry, expect to see more young artists breaking out in 2024. These musicians are not only talented but are also socially and politically aware, bringing new perspectives and messages to the forefront of popular music.
Embracing the Hybrid Sound
In 2024, we can expect artists to continue pushing boundaries and combining genres to create a truly hybrid sound. With the rise of streaming services and access to a vast array of music, artists have the freedom to experiment and mix elements from different styles, leading to exciting new sonic landscapes.
The Reemergence of Live Music
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the music industry to cancel tours and live events, leaving fans eager to return to the concert experience. In 2024, we can expect a resurgence of live music, with artists and promoters prioritizing the return of live events.
A New Era of Music Festivals
With the return of live music, we can also expect a new era of music festivals, with fresh concepts and innovative experiences for fans. Expect festivals to incorporate new technologies, interactive elements, and diverse lineups to keep fans engaged and entertained.
The Continued Rise of Latin Music
Latin music has been steadily gaining popularity in recent years, with artists like Bad Bunny and J Balvin leading the way. In 2024, we can expect Latin music to continue its ascent, with even more crossover hits and collaborations between Latin and mainstream artists.
The Evolution of Streaming
Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music have already transformed the way we listen to music, but in 2024, we can expect even more developments in the world of music streaming. Expect new platforms, features, and algorithms that cater to individual listeners’ preferences and habits.
The Emergence of New Technologies
Advancements in technology have always impacted the music industry, and in 2024, we can expect new technologies to further revolutionize the way we create, consume, and experience music. From virtual reality concerts to AI-assisted music production, expect to see new innovations that challenge traditional approaches to music.
Overall, 2024 is shaping up to be a year of exciting changes and fresh sounds in the world of music. With new artists, new technologies, and new ways of experiencing music, the industry is sure to keep fans engaged and entertained for years to come.
Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-ELinks to an external site., which can accurately imitate a human voice given a 3-second audio sample. After recognizing a particular voice, VALL-E can synthesize that person’s voice, and do so in a way that preserves the emotional tone of the speaker, reportsLinks to an external site. ArsTechnica. The creators of VALL-E suggest that it can be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications and audio content creation in combination with other generative AI models such as GPT-3Links to an external site..
Microsoft calls VALL-E the “Neural Codec Language Model,” and it’s built on the EnCodec technology that Meta introduced in October 2022. Unlike other text-to-speech methods, which typically synthesize text-to-speech by manipulating signals, VALL-E generates separate audio codecs codes from text and audio cues. Essentially, it analyzes how a person sounds, breaks that information down into individual components (called “tokens”) thanks to EnCodec, and uses training data to match what the AI “knows” about how that voice would sound if it spoke other phrases.
On the VALL-E websiteLinks to an external site., Microsoft provides dozens of audio examples of the AI model in action. Among the “Speaker Prompt” samples is three seconds of audio provided by VALL-E, which it is supposed to emulate. A “Ground Truth” is a pre-existing recording of the same speaker saying a certain phrase for comparison (like the “control” in the experiment). “Baseline” is an example of the synthesis provided by conventional text-to-speech synthesis, and the example “VALL-E” is the result of the VALL-E model.
In addition to preserving the speaker’s vocal timbre and emotional tone, VALL-E can also simulate the “acoustic environment” of an audio sample. For example, if the sample came from a phone call, it will mimic the acoustic and frequency characteristics of the phone call. And Microsoft’s samples (under “Synthesis of diversity”) demonstrate that VALL-E can generate vocal tone variations by changing the random seed used in the generation process.
The researchers seem to be aware of the potential social harm this technology could cause, stating the following: “Since VALL-E could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity, it may carry potential risks in misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker. To mitigate such risks, it is possible to build a detection model to discriminate whether an audio clip was synthesized by VALL-E. We will also put Microsoft AI Principles into practice when further developing the models.”
She didn’t recognize her husband but could still sing every word to an old Simon & Garfunkel song
By Marlene Cimons February 26, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. EST
When Laura Nye Falsone’s first child was born in 1996, the Wallflowers album “Bringing Down the Horse” was a big hit. “All I have to hear are the first notes from ‘One Headlight,’ and I am back to dancing … with my brand-new baby boy in my arms,” she says. “It fills my heart with joy every time”
When Carol Howard’s early-onset Alzheimer’s worsened, often she couldn’t recognize her husband. She once introduced him as her father. But if she heard a 1960s Simon & Garfunkel song playing, Howard, a marine biologist who died in 2019, could sing every word “effortlessly,” her husband says.
This ability of music to conjure up vivid memories is a phenomenon well known to brain researchers. It can trigger intense recollections from years past — for many, more strongly than other senses such as tasteLinks to an external site. and smell Links to an external site.— and provoke strong emotions from those earlier experiences. “Music can open forgotten doors to your memory,” says Andrew BudsonLinks to an external site., chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology, associate chief of staff for education and director of the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System.
“Music can take you back in time, as well as act like a jolt of electricity that can fire up your brain and get it going,” he says. “We all have the familiar experience of going back to our hometown, visiting our high school and feeling the memories come flooding back. Music can do same thing. It provides an auditory and emotional setting that allows us to retrieve all those memories.”
“Music activates different parts of the brain,” making it an especially versatile tool, says Amy BelfiLinks to an external site., assistant professor of psychological science at Missouri University of Science and Technology and principal investigator in its Music Cognition and Aesthetics Lab.Links to an external site. “We can use it to improve mood, to help us learn, to socially bond with other people. It becomes part of our identity, like the soundtrack of our lives, which explains why it is so effective in stimulating and retrieving memories.”
Some experts also see a role for music — which can ease agitation in those with dementia — as an alternative to sedating medications, for example, or as a means of enabling patients to keep living at home. Frank RussoLinks to an external site., professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University, says he believes this ultimately will be possible. He is chief scientific officer of a companyLinks to an external site. that is developing a music player that uses artificial intelligence to curate an individualized play list designed to guide a patient from a state of anxiety to one of calm.
“One of the really challenging things for caregivers is the anxiety and agitation,” says Russo, whose research focuses on the intersection of neuroscience and music. “A good chunk of people will end up in those care homes, where they resort to sedatives or antipsychotics. Music has a real opportunity here.”
Melissa Owens, a music therapist at Virginia Commonwealth University HealthLinks to an external site., already has seen this in her work. “I still find myself in awe of music’s ability to positively change behavior, emotion and even the relationship between a caregiver and their loved one, if even only for the duration of the specific song,” she says. It provides “a moment of normalcy which so much of the time seems lost.”
This differs from “episodicLinks to an external site.” memory, a type of long-term “explicit”Links to an external site. memory, which is a conscious recollection and is what your brain uses to remember — for example, the items on your shopping list. (Both implicit and explicit are types of long-term memory — the first unconscious and effortless, the second requiring conscious work to remember.)
Episodic memory originates in the brain’s hippocampus region, which “is the first to go” when dementia hits, Budson says. “Alzheimer’s attacks the hippocampus first and foremost,” he says, explaining why procedural memory still enables dementia patients to remember lyrics and perform. “It’s a completely different memory system,” he says.
In those with healthy brains, “episodic memory allows you to be transported back in timeLinks to an external site.” to a specific past event or time period “when you listen to a piece of music” Budson says, while the ability to sing or make music is procedural memory, meaning you don’t have to deliberately think about what you’re doing. A well-known recent example has been that of legendary singer Tony Bennett, 96, who in the throes of Alzheimer’s could still flawlessly perform his classic hits.
He says, however, that patients with Alzheimer’s still can experience the music “time travel” episodic memory phenomenon even after the disease has attacked their hippocampus, as long as those episodic memories are more than two years old. “They have been ‘consolidated,’ and once consolidated, they can be accessed even though the hippocampus has been destroyed,” says Budson, who also is a professor of neurology at Boston University.
“The consolidation process begins as soon as the first night we sleep after a memory is formed, and may take up to two years,” Budson explains. “When a memory forms, it is not stored in the hippocampus directly. The different aspects of a memory — the sights, sounds, smells, emotions and thoughts — are represented by a pattern of neural activity in different parts of the cortex, the outer surface of the brain, where the seeing, hearing, smelling, emoting and thinking is taking place.”
To grasp the concept, he says, think of memories as little balloons floating in different areas of the brain. “When a new memory is formed, it is as if the hippocampus is tying together the strings of the balloons, just like if you would hold the strings of helium balloons in your hand,” he says. “If the hippocampus was destroyed, the balloons would separate and fly away and the memory would be gone.”
But after the memory is consolidated, he says, “the different balloons become linked directly to each other through heavy cords and because of this the hippocampus is no longer needed for the memory to remain intact. This is why people with Alzheimer’s disease can recall stuff from their childhood but not remember what they had for lunch or who they saw yesterday.”
When people hear a piece of music from their youth, the “time machine” effect is something “everyone can relate to,” Russo says. “I was in high school in the 1980s and today, when I hear a song from Blondie or Depeche Mode, I have that feeling of being out with my friends, on my own, independent from my parents, when I was first starting to feel like an adult — it’s really powerful.”
He adds, “we don’t just hear a song once. There are lots of opportunities to encode that memory. Deeply encoded music can unlock these ‘flashbulb’ memories. We can remember more vivid details about events in the past when we are exposed to music.” Research has shown that effect is more so than with familiar faces or other stimuli.
Belfi has conducted researchLinks to an external site. specifically on this. In one small study, 30 participants listened to 15-second excerpts from music that was popular when they were younger — ages 15 to 30. After hearing the clips, they saw photos of famous people’s faces from the same time period, including politicians, athletes and movie stars — but no musicians, to avoid confusion.
The scientists asked participants about each stimulus and to describe any “autobiographical” memories inspired by the exposure. “The music prompted much more detailed memories than the faces,” she says. “We found from this study that music tends to be associated with personal memories from life.”
In another small study, she says she had participants — 39 young adults ages 18 to 34 and 39 older adults ages 60 to 77 — keep diaries over a four-day period recording their responses to both music they heard and food they ate, cooked, saw in supermarkets and viewed on a baking program.
“Music triggered more frequent autobiographical memories, a greater proportion of involuntary memories, and memories rated as more personally important in comparison to food cues,” she says. This wouldn’t surprise Falsone, a lab manager at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. The “baby boy” she danced with in her arms is now 26, and she has two more sons and a daughter. . Her children have all heard her “Wallflowers” story.
“If I mention it, they all roll their eyes and go, ‘Yes Mom, we know. You like this song.’” she says, “But they smile.”
Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Tesla and other automakers are eliminating AM radio from some new vehicles, stirring protests against the loss of a medium that has shaped American life for a century
By Marc Fisher May 13, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
America’s love affair between the automobile and AM radio — a century-long romance that provided the soundtrack for lovers’ lanes, kept the lonely company with ballgames and chat shows, sparked family singalongs and defined road trips — is on the verge of collapse, a victim of galloping technological change and swiftly shifting consumer tastes.
The breakup is entirely one-sided, a move by major automakers to eliminate AM radios from new vehicles despite protests from station owners, listeners, first-responders and politicians from both major parties.
Automakers, such as BMW, Volkswagen, Mazda and Tesla, are removing AM radios from new electric vehicles because electric engines can interfere with the sound of AM stations. And Ford, one of the nation’s top-three auto sellers, is taking a bigger step, eliminating AM from all of its vehicles, electric or gas-operated.
Some station owners and advertisers contend that losing access to the car dashboard will indeed be a death blow to many of the nation’s 4,185 AM stations — the possible demise of a core element of the nation’s delivery system for news, political talk (especially on the right), coverage of weather emergencies and foreign language programming.
“This is a tone-deaf display of complete ignorance about what AM radio means to Americans,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade journal covering the talk radio industry. “It’s not the end of the world for radio, but it is the loss of an iconic piece of American culture.”
For the first hundred years of mass media, AM radio shaped American life: It was where Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his fireside chatsLinks to an external site.; where a young Ronald Reagan announced Chicago CubsLinks to an external site. baseball games; where DJs such as Wolfman Jack along the U.S.-Mexico border, Larry Lujack in Chicago, Alan Freed in Cleveland, “Cousin Brucie” Morrow in New York City and Don Imus in California, Texas, Ohio and New York howled, growled and shouted out the latest pop hits.
Through the snap and crackle of distant lightning and the hum of overhead power lines, AM radio’s sometimes-staticky signal dominated the country’s soundscape. From the 1950s into the 1970s, Top 40 hit music stations in many big cities maintained astonishing shares of the audience, with 50 percent and more of listeners tuned to a single station, meaning that people could walk along a city sidewalk and hear one station continuously blasting out of transistor radios, boomboxes and, above all, car radios.
But technology moved on, and the silky smooth sound of FM radio and then the crystal digital clarity of streaming stations and podcasts narrowed AM’s hold on the American imagination.
Ken Fritz was years into his questto build the world’s greatest stereo when he realized it would take more than just gear.It would take more than the Krell amplifiers and the Ampex reel-to-reel. More than the trio of 10-foot speakers he envisioned crafting by hand.
And it would take more than what would come to be the crown jewel of his entire system: the $50,000 custom record player, his “Frankentable,” nestled in a 1,500-pound base designed to thwart any needle-jarring vibrations and equipped with three different tone arms, each calibrated to coax a different sound from the same slab of vinyl.
“If I play jazz, maybe that cartridge might bloom a little more than the other two,” Fritz explained to me. “On classical, maybe this one.”
No, building the world’s greatest stereo would mean transforming the very space that surrounded it — and the lives of the people who dwelt there.
The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up newsiding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.
In 1989, Ken Fritz began to assemble the world’s greatest hi-fi. He completed the project at his Richmond home in 2016. Soon after, he received a diagnosis. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
“My dad had a workshop,” is how Rosemary, the youngest girl, now 56, puts it. “We were forever building, rebuilding.”
But for the final flourish of his epic engineering project, in 2020, Fritz would go it alone.
He found just the right suction cups, four in total and the perfect size, from a company in Germany. He ordered a small vacuum pump online.
It was hardly the Frankentable’s most expensive enhancement, but it would fulfill a desire he could scarcely have imagined when he began his lifelong search for the perfect sound:
It would allow him to place a record on the turntable without even lifting the disc.
.
What’s the value of the world’s greatest stereo? Soon, everyone would know. But for now, just hit play.
Camille Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3. It’s a favorite. Famous for its glorious pipe organ, it was the last symphony finished by the great French romantic composer.
“Should we listen, Dad?” asked Betsy, 59, the oldest of Fritz’s five children, and the only one upto help inventory his life’s work as his 80th birthday approached.
Fritz laughed.
“You won’t get a no from me,” he said.
The music builds slowly, lush strings answered by woodwinds, until the organ crashes into the mix and sparks a cascading piano dialogue that requires four hands. Its fullness and power washed over Fritz’s listening room.
He was a boy at the dawn of the hi-fi revolution. This was 70 years ago, long before holograms and virtual realities tried to fool our brains into seeing something that’s not there, when stereo first sold us an auditory experience like no other.
Just lower the needle, and an invisible 70-piece big band was transported into your living room — or a whispering crooner would come to life on the couch cushion beside you.
The trick, pioneered in the early 1930s by engineers working at Bell Labs in New York and Abbey Road Studios in London, was in the two channels of sound. Recorded from separate microphones and played back through separate speakers, they could simulate the swirling warmth and depth of life.
By the 1950s, the first bulky hi-fis were marketed for home use, blowing open the closed feel of the old phonographs — and offering a newly affluent nation a sophisticated new field of connoisseurship to conquer. The Mantovani Orchestraor Rosemary Clooney, pouring out of the Klipschorns with the after-dinner martinis.
One day, Fritz’s teacher at his Milwaukee grade school set up a turntable and speakers in the classroom. He was stunned by the beauty of the classical music. But he was especially thrilled by the sense of being on the cutting edge of a new technology.
Within a couple of years, teenage Fritz had bought his own recording machine and started capturing the music of live bands. He started the Hi-Fi Club at Bay View High School and took a part-time job in an appliance store that sold audio gear. With his earnings, he picked up a Heathkit, one of the hot, new build-it-yourself amplifiers, for $49.
You probably know a Ken Fritz. Maybe you are a bit of one yourself. Prosperous mid-century America produced a lot of Kens. The kind of people who gave their all to their hobbies — bowling, gardening, woodworking, stamp collecting — and refused to pay somebody else to manifest their dreams for them.
Like a lot of kids born to the children of the Depression, Fritz absorbed his DIY ethos from the previous generation. When their ’51 Chevrolet broke down, Ken Fritz Sr. didn’t have the money for a mechanic. So he took the engine apart himself and figured out how to install new piston rings. “He had never done that before,” Fritz recalled. “But he was smart enough to know how.”
At an audio show in 1957, Ken Jr. met Saul Marantz — an engineering legend in this burgeoning field, who a decade earlier had been so driven to convert an old car radio for home use that he took it apart and reconstructed it into a new invention, a preamplifier he dubbed the Audio Consolette. For a kid like Fritz, it was better than meeting Willie Mays.
“He looked like the guy on ‘Breaking Bad,’ just a little, but smaller,” Fritz recalled. “I told him I wanted to buy his amplifier. He knew I didn’t have the money.”
Fritz persuaded his boss at an audio shop to set Marantz up as a dealer. That earned him a discount, though he still had to work Saturdays to make up the rest.
After college, he worked for a business that made fiberglass molds and eventually moved to Virginia. He started his own company there, settling into the family home on Hybla Road in the mid-’70s.
He added a workshop and eventually built a swimming pool, something of a sop to his wife, Judy, and their kids, since he was too busy for travel or vacations. His company consumed the days. His audio obsession filled the nights and weekends.
In the 1980s, Fritz launched his project by blowing up the living room into a listening room, a 1,650-square-foot bump-out based on the same shoe box ratio, just under 2 to 1, that worked magic in concert halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The idea was that the acoustic waves would similarly roll off Fritz’s long, cement-filled walls and 17-foot-high, wood-paneled ceiling to bathe the listener in music.
He got his older son, Kurt, to help pour the concrete floors. Then he worked alongside a construction crew to put up the 12-inch-thick walls and the sound panels to line them.
To minimize hum and potential electrical interference, Fritz outfitted the room with its own 200-amp electrical system and HVAC system, independent from the rest of the house.
He crafted by hand the three 10-foot speakers that loomed like alien monoliths at the head of the room, with the help of Paul Gibson, a former employee at his fiberglass company. Each 1,400-pound slab pulsed with 24 cone drivers for the deeper tones and 40 tweeters — 30 shooting into the room, 10 toward the crimson curtains draping the wall behind — to project the upper-range sounds.
He bought only a few of the components ready-made from a retailer. Fritz and his audiophile friends believed it was idiotic to invest in the kind of top-shelf equipment that gleamed from the glossy pages of High Fidelity magazine. Only a home-crafted system could achieve the audio you desired.
“You’re going to spend $250,000 for the name brand on the rack so everybody comes in and will be impressed,” scoffed Mark Mieckowski, a retired electrician who had helped Fritz fine-tune his system over the years. “DIY, there’s no name tags, nobody knows nothing. And I guarantee you those will probably sound a million times better.”
It was thrilling work. At night, Fritz would lie in bed and think about the progress he had made that day and the tasks that lay ahead for the next.
“I firmly believe that by the time a person, man or woman, is 19, 20, 21, they know what they’re going to do with their life,” he said. “And if you’re on that path and things are being done to your satisfaction, it’s easy to keep going to look for the next goal.”
Not everyone in the rapidly metastasizing house on Hybla Road shared this excitement.
In the faded photos taken as they worked alongside him, the five Fritz kids are offering pinched smiles, at best.
“Nobody wanted to come to our house, because he wanted to put them to work,” said his daughter Patty, 58. “I think we went camping twice, never took vacation. It was just work, work, work.”
Fritz thought he was teaching them about hard work and focus. A hard-driving boss at his company, he brought the same energy to his after-hours hobby, which he sometimes seemed to think of as everybody’s hobby.
He could be short. He held grudges. Devoted to sound, he often seemed not to listen.
Judy drank too much in those days. She also was unimpressed by her husband’s music. When he played “Swan Lake,” she’d call it “Pig Pond” in front of the kids and crank up the TV to annoy him.
After the divorce, she stopped drinking and found a longtime partner. Fritz moved on as well, finding happiness with Sue, who worked on making molds at his company; they married in 1995.
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.”
As he got older, Fritz sometimes wondered if he could have made space within his own vast ambitions to consider other people’s goals and wishes.
“I was a father pretty much in name,” Fritz told me. “I was not a typical father or a typical husband.”
The big blowup with Kurt came in 2018, about two years after Fritz had declared that, at last, the world’s greatest stereo and listening room was complete. 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.
His doctor had explained the cruel reality of Fritz’s disease. A small percentage of people go on to live years with ALS, continuing to work and function. But for most others, the transformation is rapid and devastating. People in the prime of life and health are robbed of muscular control and eventually the ability to speak, swallow and breathe.
For Fritz, there was initial hope, as he began treatment at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and continued to stay on his feet, that his case would progress slowly. But one day in 2020, he tried to use the Frankentable and found he couldn’t lift his arms.
“I can’t listen to these records anymore,” he told Sue.
“Well, if you want to sit down and tell me what you want to hear, I can put it on,” she replied.
But Fritz was not ready to relinquish control over his creation. That sparked the suction-cup idea. Fatal condition? Like all other hurdles on the path to the world’s greatest stereo, he would simply try to out-engineer it.
His plan was ingenious. It would involve rigging the suction cups to secure a record so he could shift it onto the turntable with a mere flip of a switch — a tiny gesture he felt confident his failing body would still allow for a while.
But before getting too deep into the project, he stopped. His neurological deterioration was accelerating. By the time he finished constructing the device, he realized, he wouldn’t even be able to remove a record from its sleeve.
A friend in Texas mailed Fritz a hard drive packed with thousands of songs, from Motown to Mozart. Now he could play music with his iPad. It might not have had the analog warmth of a Shaded Dog vinyl pressing of Arthur Rubinstein playing Beethoven, but on the Fritz system, through those mighty speakers, it wasn’t half-bad.
His younger son, Scott, 49, offered another welcome distraction.
They, too, had clashed over the years and occasionally stopped talking. Scott didn’t like how his father sometimes treated people. There was the time that Fritz blew up when a friend didn’t return some borrowed microphones promptly and insisted Scott go retrieve them, even though the man’s wife had just died. And Scott hatedhow his dad acted toward Kurt.
“He definitely taught me my work ethic,” Scott said. “But I don’t need to spend time with people who behave like that.”
Still, the two maintained a special bond, Scott having followed their shared passion into a career as a sound engineer in Chicago. In 2018, he and a filmmaker friend, Jeremy Bircher, drove to Virginia to make a documentary: “One Man’s Dream.”
The 58-minute film opens with Fritz, moodily backlit at his record shelves, grazing a hand across the jacket spines before landing on Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” In slow-motion close-ups, we see him press the disc to the turntable with a custom weight, lower the needle of an Air Tight PC-1 cartridge to the spinning grooves and carry a glass of wine to the paisley wing chair in the center of the Historic Williamsburg-meets-Victorian listening room. He faces those stalagmite speakers as the brass section collides with the swooning strings, taking it all in with a mesmerized smile.
Some audio professionals found it unbearable.
“You’re mining the lunatic fringe,” Jonathan Weiss, the owner of Brooklyn-based high-end audio boutique OMA, warned me when I told him about this story. Fritz, he argued, was the kind of obsessive who gives audiophiles a bad name.
But Steve Guttenberg, host of the popular Audiophiliac YouTube channel, shared the documentary with his 240,000 subscribers, calling Fritz “one of a kind.” It has now been viewed more than 1.9 million times on YouTube.
“This room/house must be listed in UNESCO World Heritage List. So much passion, soul and heart!” wrote one of the thousands of commenters.
“This is truly something that needs to be conserved,” wrote another, “as a memory to this inspiring man.”
One day in April 2021, Fritz hosted a small listening party. Before the pandemic, he frequently invited the entire Richmond Audio Society for sound and sandwiches. But on this day, it was just two of his closest audio-geek friends and me.
Ray Breakall, a professional piano tuner whose record collection is split between jazz and classical, remembered the first time Fritz played for him a 1950s recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Fritz Reiner conducting.
“It was almost like the orchestra was in the room,” Breakall said. “That’s impossible if the room isn’t this size. Very scary and very realistic.”
Mieckowski — the sound buddy whose tastes ran more toward Five Finger Death Punch, a thrash-metal combo from Nevada, and who didn’t even own a turntable — was there, too.
“I can flat-out say this is the best system I’ve ever heard,” said Mieckowski. “Period.”
They talked more about the room, Fritz occasionally piping in but more often sitting back and listening, seemingly worn out. Betsy put out deli meat and rolls, and Fritz worked his way slowly through a sandwich, cutting up the pieces small enough to swallow. He seemed re-energized by the time they returned to the stereo.
“Here’s a great rock song, and it gets your juices going,” Fritz told us.
He punched up “Do You Love Me,” the 1962 hit featured so prominently in the musical melodrama “Dirty Dancing.”
And here it was, the inevitable moment in every meeting with an audiophile, when the proud owner of the system in question presses play.
I had experienced it when Weiss invited me to the OMA showroom to listen to the enormous horn speakers he sells for about $300,000 a pair; and when I sat in the cramped basement of veteran stereo-and-vinyl journalist Michael Fremer as he blasted the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” through his Wilson speakers.
They all want to know: What do you think?
But as Fritz cranked the loudest version of the Contours hit I’d ever heard, it was impossible to listen critically. Was the bass flabby or tight? Did the mids sound right? What about the drums? The voice?
Fritz nodded, his eyes brightening. I found myself reflexively smiling, meeting his look with an expression of wonder, mouthing “wow.”
I was rooting for a man who had devoted his life to this system. I wanted it to sound better than any other. Even if I really couldn’t tell.
Was it truly “wow?” Or merely loud?
I noticed Mieckowski shake his head, involuntarily and almost imperceptibly, as soon as the music kicked in. He remained politely appreciative in front of his friend. But later, I followed him out to his car, where he confessed that, no, it sounded off that day.
He speculated that the Fritzes had probably been watching a DVD in the listening room and accidentally left the speakers on movie mode. A common mistake. But the fact that Fritz could no longer detect an imperfection in a system he had spent years honing to his impossibly high standards was a heartbreaking reminder of his friend’s physical decline.
“He can’t remember half the time what he’s listening to and what he’s left on,” Mieckowski said, referring to the system’s smorgasbord of settings.
Three years earlier, in Scott’s documentary, Fritz had talked frankly about his condition, the limited number of years that remained for him and his hope that the world’s greatest stereo system would live on without him.
“I’d hate like heck to see this room parted out,” he had said. “That’s just like breaking up a dream.”
But on this night, Mieckowski had a glimpse of the not-so-distant future. Fritz’s stereo system may as well have been a load-bearing wall. His dream had been woven into the actual structure of his home. They were virtually inseparable.
And who would want to buy a stereo that cost more than the house?
“Anybody that’s got that kind of money,” Mieckowski said, “doesn’t want to live here.”
.
They gathered in the listening room one last time. Ken Fritz was turning 80. His sons weren’t there. Kurt remained estranged. Scott couldn’t make it down from Chicago. But Fritz’s three daughters and their husbands came and sang “Happy Birthday.” He sat for a portrait and even had a small spoon of ice cream, as much as his constricted throat muscles could tolerate.
It was February of 2022. Six years after he had finished his life’s project. Four years after he was told he only had so much longer to enjoy it.
Betsy, while helping him inventory his collection, had observed how her hard-charging dad had softened. He was able to share his regrets about his style of fathering. But he had no regrets about the hours, weeks and years that he had devoted to the world’s greatest stereo.
At some point, Betsy flicked the power on the 35,000-watt amplifiers and put on a selection of Christmas songs. Fritz always preferred his booming classical works, but the holiday tunes worked as background music, since they still had the 10-foot tree and the garlands on the banister. And Fritz wasn’t making a lot of musical choices anymore.
He was beyond the point where music could make him feel better, especially since he could no longer operate the system himself.
In April, around the time Betsy arranged to put a hospital bed on the ground floor so Fritz could avoid the stairs, she also tried to broker a peace.
Kurt called and tried to talk to his father. Betsy urged him to take the call. Fritz refused. In the end, they never spoke. On April 21, 2022, Fritz died.
And then it fell to Betsy to try to fulfill her father’s last, greatest wish.
For a time, it looked like an old audiophile pal of her father’s would buy both the house and the system. But he and his wife changed their minds.
Betsy talked to dealers about looking for other potential buyers. They were not enthusiastic.
Adam Wexler, with the Brooklyn-based StereoBuyers, told her he could resell the Krells. The custom-designed equipment would be a lot harder.
“Hi-fi is extremely subjective,” Wexler told me later. “So this guy built something that sounded good to him. How many people out there are going to say, ‘These are the speakers for me’ — and go through the hassle of acquiring these gigantic speakers that probably wouldn’t fit in most people’s homes, even if you could get them to their homes?”
Late last summer, Betsy realized she had to let go. Another couple wanted to buy the house — but not the stereo. She made a deal with a local online auction site, eBid Local, to catalogue and sell her father’s life’s work.
These people knew nothing about concert-hall acoustics, setting the vertical tracking angle or the magic of the perfect “Swan Lake” recording. They knew marketing.
“We euphemistically refer to it as the ‘million-dollar, monumental, magical, musical masterpiece,’” said David Staples, the owner of eBid Local. “It may be the best, most elaborate and exquisite private residential audiophile system in the country, perhaps even in the world.”
Many of the records her father had spent a lifetime collecting had already been sold — and Betsy understood that the system itself would almost certainly be parceled out to multiple buyers as well.
So what, ultimately, would be the value of the world’s greatest stereo?
The auction closed just before Thanksgiving.
The Frankentable? There were 44 bids, the top at a mere $19,750.
The 10-foot-tall speakers? After 18 bids, an Indiana man named Carlton Bale snagged all three for $10,100. Less than you’d pay for a pair of Yamaha NS-5000 bookshelf speakers.
A fan of Fritz’s YouTube documentary, Bale had set out a couple of years ago to build what he imagined would be “the second-best loudspeaker in the world” — until he heard about the Fritz auction.
“I thought, ‘Do I really have the time to build the speakers I want that probably aren’t going to sound as good as the ones Ken built?’” Bale recently recalled, after driving to Virginia with a U-Haul to fetch them last month. The price, he conceded, was “a steal. The bargain of a lifetime.”
The total take for the million-dollar stereo system, including the speakers, the turntable, the dozens of other components from detached cones to the reel-to-reel decks? $156,800.
But perhaps that was always going to be its fate. Last summer, when pressed about the value of Ken Fritz’s life’s work, Staples had demurred.
The value, the auctioneer said, was whatever somebody else was willing to pay for it.
Previous Module: WEEK 3: JULY 1-7 Flashcards - Audio Media
. 
. 
