NOT!

Huikyong and I spent the entire week at the ISU World figure Skating Championships at the Staples Center. (The final show is this afternoon.)

Staples is a great venue, though one of the big mistakes was installing a Bose sound system. It actually works fine for announcer's voices and really simple things like percussive effects, but as a music source:

It has all the charm Bose is known for. It's shrill, it's strident, it's harsh, and it's full of distortion whenever called upon to reproduce a lot of musical sound at once. No wonder no quality musical act will use the house sound.

There are four main clusters of Bose speakers flown from the rafters, each with three of the infamous Bose Tubes. When those things get overloaded it's like sound is coming out of the barrel of a plastic cannon. I covered my ears more than once to stop the noise. It had an edge sharper than an ice skate, so to speak.

Last night we hurried home to watch the NBC two-hour broadcast of the women's finals we had just seen, complete with Kim Yu-Na's great performance. Interestingly, the sound feed was direct from the source rather than the house system, so it actually sounded much better at home than in the arena. When the feed switched over to Dick Button, Michele Kwan, and Bob Costas during the performance breaks, the sound went back to "live" in the house, and it was easy to tell just how bad it was.