Basic HTML Version
30
winter
|
spr ing
deal, as we feel speaker grills are very disfiguring.”
The whole-house controller and amplifier sound system is from
Sonos, a Santa Barbara company, whose founder is now a good friend
and one of Peter’s clients. The Sonos system offers access to Rhapsody and
Pandora music services, “and
millions
of types of music with the press of a
button,” Ray exults.
“If you gave me the name of an artist,” he continues, “from 1933, and
your favorite recording of them, I could probably have it playing within
thirty seconds.”
Ray attests to the system’s user-friendliness: “Peter’s father was resting in
our guest house,” Ray relates, “and he came in and saw this controller sitting
there. We came back and within an hour he was listening to Beethoven.”
The Sonos System goes out over the internet seeking music. If there
are five or six computers in one’s house and one decides to download a
Beatles album on one of them, Sonos will find it. Every morning, about 2
am, it automatically searches a home’s entire network for new audio files.
When it finds something new, it categorizes it, pulls up the album cover
and all the information about the album off the internet so that when the
homeowner goes to play it, he’ll have the album cover in graphics. One
can add any of those songs to up to a hundred different play lists.
You can, for example, create an ‘intimate dinner music’ play list for a
certain group of people. “Sonos goes out and may pick up something off
Peter’s computer, something off our hard disc,” Ray illustrates, “five pieces
of music off of Rhapsody in Minneapolis, and two pieces off some radio
station and puts it all together as one play list and plays that every time
you punch that button.
“There are even play lists,” Ray continues, “where you pick an artist
and a song and then you say, ‘I want to construct my personal radio
station that has that type of music.’ Sonos will start playing music that
it thinks is that type for you. Then you can say ‘I like that song,’ or ‘I
don’t like that song.’ So, then it refines its logic and says ‘Oh, he didn’t
like the fact that it is a little fast or wasn’t melodic enough. Then, when
you ask for information, it’ll tell you what the characteristics are: mid-
century classical music, slow, in major keys, quiet, non-obtrusive.” The
device also explains what filtering conditions it used in constructing that
play list.
“The sound quality is superb,” Ray, who has been in the sound
business since 1957, when he was a record producer, and had two
recording studios in Boston, concludes. “For in-home use it will match
anything on the market,” he avers.
The system is versatile: one can have different music in different
rooms, separately. The dining room can play Mozart while Beethoven
plays in the bedroom, and jazz is piped in on the front lawn. For each
zone there is a controller and each zone has its own server. All are
connected by wireless and an Ethernet cable.
Outside, loudspeakers are buried underground with vents that direct
the sound aboveground, “so this ethereal music surrounds you as you walk
around in all the gardens,” Ray points out.
EAL ESTATES
Steel I-beams and
poured-in-place concrete
construction provide the
wine cellar dining room,
wine cellar, and 20-seat
stadium-style movie
theater with exceptional
safe-haven features