Review: The Hollywood Bowl's beast of a new sound system is a work in progress

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred Hardly anyone walking up Peppertree Lane notices the Hollywood Bowl Museum on the way to the amphitheater entrance.The overlooked museum, however, has been refreshed with an enchanting new exhibition.

Well-timed, it provides an excellent primer on changing L.A.mores seen through the history of the Bowl over the past century.Change is again upon us.

As Angelenos have evolved, so have our ideas about the Bowl.A concert was a concert and audiences of yore dressed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, indoors or out.

Men wore coats, ties and fedoras.I have a photo of my mother at the Bowl on a chilly 1940s evening sporting, like other ladies around her in the inexpensive bleachers, her mink stole.The Bowl was said to boast, before the construction of the Hollywood Freeway, a natural acoustical, well, bowl.

Even so, sonic adventurers, beginning with Leopold Stokowski in the 1930s, experimented with amplification in an obsessive, seemingly quixotic effort to locate a mythical sonic grail on the Cahuenga Pass.Boys with their toys, thought The Times’ feisty critic Isabelle Morse Jones.We now have it with a spectacular new sound system along with the old caveat: Beware of what you wish for.The Bowl, of course, remains the Bowl.

Last week when the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened its summer season in the venue it built and has managed for over a century, there were all the familiar alfresco and musical pleasures: convivial picnicking, fine weather, inimitable atmosphere, a white-jacketed orchestra on an iconic stage.The museum’s panorama of ageless ambience is this summer enhanced by increased yet snappy security and a handsome “John Williams Stage” plaque honoring L.A.’s beloved composer.The newly designed white French loudspeakers suspended over the Bowl stage along with ground-level white cubes of super-...