I went to The Who at the former Oakland Coliseum, ...

I went to The Who at the former Oakland Coliseum, now known as the Oracle Arena, on February 1, 2013 with a friend and she and I both agree that the sound was THE WORST of any concert we've seen in our lives. (We are both in our early forties -- she's 40 and I'm 44 -- and we have each seen hundreds, if not a thousand, concerts in our lives.)

We purchased tickets for the 200 section but when we got to the seats we noticed that there were NO SPEAKERS in the entire upper balcony area. The music sounded like it was being played on a transistor radio sitting in a fish bowl in another room.

The irony, of course, is that The Who set records as The Loudest Band In The World and the people in our section were yelling "TURN IT UP!"

Eventually, more than halfway through the show, we decided to mutiny. The sound was better standing next to the concession stand in the hallway than it was in our seats. Once we heard how good the band was sounding to those people within a direct line of the speakers, we opted to go down into the lower level and risk getting scolded by ushers rather than wait another ten years for The Who to tour the U.S. again. In the lower level the band sounded great, the lights looked great and it was everything a Who concert deserved to be.

We both felt it totally unconscionable for the venue to even sell seats with sound that bad. We also recognized that since the new ownership of the venue where we used to see The Grateful Dead for many a terrific show, not only has the sound quality worsened considerably, but the size of the seats has shrunk considerably. The aisles are thinner, the hallways are thinner, everything seems geared towards more corporate box seats, more herd animal treatment of the crowd and less consideration of the experience of the audience members. In other words, we felt like we were consumers being sold a product, not valued attendees whose experience was of any consideration whatsoever.

If I return to this venue, I'm going to look closely at the seating chart before I buy a ticket. Some seats in this venue simply should not be sold unless the venue wires speakers on the upper level.