[Ken Fritz has abilities and ambition that put most of us to shame. Ken decided to build his own speakers—and the listening room for them. As you’ll see, he did everything in a big way. Having produced tooling for the cast polymer baffle for the Thiel CS5, Ken says, “I thought I’d cast baffles for this system also.” As one would. ;->
The scope of the work required to build both speakers and room will take at least two articles to convey—maybe three. Meanwhile: take a look, and be amazed. Part 1 of the article appeared in Copper #72 — Ed.]
Like Paul McGowan, I too have gone to extremes to build a music room, loud speakers, and electronics to produce music that I will listen to until I go to my grave.
The room is 30 x 55 ft., with a 12 ft. ceiling at the front and 17 ft. at the rear. I appropriated the ceiling design from a concert hall in Osaka, Japan. It changes height 5 times from the front to the back.
The walls are 12-inch cinder block that was laid with Durawall steel mesh between each course. Each vertical cavity was filled with 1-inch rebar and then with 3500 PSI pea gravel concrete.
The walls were then fired out with 2×6 studs on 12-inch centers, and purlins every 2 feet vertically. Next, 4 x 8 x 3/4 plywood was glued and screwed to the studs. Then, two layers of 5/8-inch fire code sheetrock glued with Durabond 90 and screwed to the plywood. This construction technique was suggested to me by Jim Thiel. My company did the patterns, masters, and production fiberglass molds for the Thiel CS5 loudspeakers.
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