The new 21,000-capacity, $375 million state-of-the-art entertainment complex is completely lifeless acoustically. That means there's no natural echo or reverb in the room to distort the pure sound coming from the facility's sound system.
``We listened to it the other night and it's a smoker,'' said Tom Clelland, senior project manager for Bose Corp., which manufactured the system. ``It's always a big day when you fire up a system like that and we were delighted. It speaks with authority and it's clear and intelligible from every seat in the house. It rocked.''
Staples' unconventional $1.5 million Bose system features four raised speaker clusters. A more traditional design revolving around a single central mounted speaker cluster was out of the question because it failed to address the safety glass that rings the ice during hockey games.
That safety glass obstructs flying pucks - and the sound coming from flying fingers on flying fretboards.
``So, we used tiers of loudspeakers, each flown parallel with the safety partition,'' explained Staples Center spokesman Michael Roth
. ``By placing one array on each side and at each end of the game boards, the sound is angled directly into the seats behind the glass. The system is designed to deliver sound to every person in the arena.''