The imperial Wenceslas Castle, a late Gothic moated castle from the 14th century, characterizes the cityscape.
Defiant city gates border the market square with its medieval town hall and its beautiful half-timbered facades.
Lauf an der Pegnitz, within easy reach of the S-Bahn east of Nuremberg, is an idyllic place.
And in the middle, built in the 19th century on the remains of an ancient vaulted cellar, is a town house with mighty sandstone walls, surrounded by a picturesque half-timbered ensemble.
Tranquility is at home here.
Still? Year and day ago, the cozy walls fell into the hands of two professional modernizers. Thomas Brett, cabinet maker and interior design specialist, had bought the historic property and was now eager to renovate its interior, which had been badly damaged by the ravages of time. Project partner Heiko Neundörfer employs an entire team that deals with the integration of smart electronics and opulent media technology. Multiroom loudspeakers, home theater ingredients and related items are among his favorite resources. How do the digital lifestyle and the comfort of the ancients turned into stone fit together? We looked at the real estate experiment on the spot.
The first impression is surprising. The dining room on the ground floor, for example, breathes the spirit of the twenties. Simple wooden Thonet chairs in the style of the time are grouped around a large dining table, a lamp with a chrome-plated shade would also have cut a good figure on Friedlich Ebert's desk, a half-height closet with fine oak ribs offers unobtrusive storage space, an angular, wide one The sofa matches the design language of the ensemble. And music fills the whole room. But where does it come from? Loudspeakers are nowhere to be seen. Neundörfer has hidden them perfectly. In any case, the heavy wooden ceiling with its angular beams was out of the question as an installation location for sound transducers.
Aesthetic reasons spoke against it, but the modernizers also called monument protection on the scene, because maintaining the ceiling was part of their long list of specifications. However, built-in speakers as we know them are nowhere to be seen. They would have been identified with textile cladding or sound grilles. The solution to the riddle: The sound generators installed here are behind the wallpaper. Pursonic, a subsidiary of the German-Swiss hi-fi manufacturer Revox, has the right thing on offer: ultra-flat loudspeakers that can be installed without deep mounting holes. Their membranes consist of sheets of rigid plastic foam, which is also used for building insulation. The feather-light material can be painted over with wall paint or covered with wallpaper.
Of course, such transducers need tuition in order to achieve real hi-fi form. They get it from an eight-channel multiroom amplifier called Anthem MDX-8, which sits behind a steel control cabinet door in a small pantry. This component has digital equalizers on board that can calibrate each tone to match the desired reproduction. The device, which can be controlled online, is therefore also suitable for measuring: a microphone listens to the playback of test signals and reports what is heard to the amplifier, which then compensates for any dents and peaks in the sound pressure curve. The Anthem component has four digital stereo inputs. It can therefore be easily connected to components of all conceivable multiroom systems. The two townhouse renovators opted for the Sonos platform. Four streaming receivers,Called ports in the manufacturer's nomenclature, they therefore have their regular place in the control cabinet directly above the power amplifier, in order, controlled by the smartphone app, to play music from all conceivable sources in just as many rooms.