The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

One of the best and busiest is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The hall, built in the early 1950's, hosts a wide-ranging and eclectic roster of performances, lectures and seminars on a near-nightly basis. Since its opening in the late 1950's, the 400-seat Auditorium has been hailed as one of the city's best kept secrets - a grand old room that's as majestic as it is intimate. Sonically, however, it's traditionally come up a bit short. The original sound system, probably dating back to the Kennedy administration, was a long-standing source of frustration.