Builds his own speaker cabinets with no thought of acoustics.
Spends thousands trying to get “clean” power.
Doesn’t treat his room.
Classic audiophile.
Few 00$ on acoustic foam, some good room EQ (there is software to do this for you) and some non chinesium speakers is all you need.
He definitely did treat his room!
There's a documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b2IOOhJmxw . He starts talking about the room about 7:00 and then again about 8:50.
It is a custom-built room. It has cinder block walls, but inside them are 2x6 studs spaced 12 inches apart with purlins for extra bracing, then two layers of 5/8-inch drywall.
From the video, you can see that the ceiling of the room is sloped. The front and back walls are curved and have curtains hanging on them. Although the side walls seem to be parallel, there are a lot of irregular surfaces that should break up the sound, including a big fireplace that juts out. The floor is wood but is mostly covered in rugs.
And as far as acoustic treatment, he had a local manufacturer of acoustics products come out and measure the room's acoustics, and then they installed sound panels. The company's blog talks about working with him on it: https://acousticsfirst.info/tag/ken-fritz/
It's the ironclad guarantee that the carbon fiber bike won't gain that 4 pounds back in the coming weeks and months. :)
From the article, it sounds like he did have some room treatment:
> 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.
This doesn't happen so much in concert halls because the walls aren't usually parallel and orchestras aren't loud enough to excite the modes for long.
But if you put a big PA in a large concert hall and kick it with sine waves, there are always a few frequencies that make the room ring.
https://darklantern.proboards.com/post/16119
https://acousticsfirst.info/tag/ken-fritz
> The general thoughts that went into the overall plan in designing this room was to accommodate not only audio but video. The acoustic plan was to eliminate as many parallel surfaces as possible. The side walls are skewed out by 2” from front to back to help reduce slap echos. Both the front and the back of the room incorporate a curve design that would help scatter sound. I replicated the ceiling design from a concert hall in Osaka, Japan. The ceiling to floor dimension at the front of the room, 11.5 feet, expanded in five different planes to 17.5 feet at the rear of the room.
> Acoustic testing was then done by a Richmond company, “Acoustics First”. ETF measurements were taken and sound panels were then designed according to a patented algorithm. The panels were then built by Owens Corning according to prescribed specification.
Also, obligatory paywall archive link: https://archive.is/nR1VQ
Room EQ Wizard[0] was quite easy to use for other speakers.
Someone also linked RoomEQWizard, which is an awesome tool, but dialling in a flat sound with it using just an EQ is going to send you to phase hell, and you’ll also need a halfway decent measurement microphone to get the most of it.
Everything my old rack would do has been replicated in software at state of the art quality with free software. Any old desktop PC is powerful enough.
A calibrated measurement microphone can be bought for 79$: https://www.minidsp.com/products/acoustic-measurement/umik-1 or https://cross-spectrum.com/measurement/calibrated_umik.html