Best Room for Listening

Dell Hall at the Long Center

Sure, Dell Hall is easy on the eyes – all that warm cherrywood paneling and those dusky green seats are so soothing to look at – but the concert venue is absolute ecstasy on the ears. The care with which the Long Center designers and acoustician Mark Holden of JaffeHolden constructed the hall allows every sound, even a pianissimo note from an unamplified violin, to be heard in its farthest reaches. Vents that let sound pass through the balconies, banners, baffles, Venetian plaster, and, yes, that lovely wood work together to channel whatever kind of music is being made – classical, rock, bluegrass, you name it – to you with such fullness and clarity that you feel you're in the midst of the musicians instead of far away from them. What was the old THX tagline? "The audience is listening." In Dell Hall, they certainly are and loving it like never before.

Long Center for the Performing Arts
701 W. Riverside, 512/474-5664
thelongcenter.org