Before a concert, the lobby of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, can bring to mind Penn Station at rush hour . It’s hard to know what to do in the crush of people jammed in front of the box office. Then you have to wait in line to go through airport-style security checkpoints to take the escalator up to the Grand Promenade — which, with a few paltry refreshment stands and yet more lines at intermission, doesn’t feel very grand.

The auditorium — especially the stage, with its curiously low ceiling and odd-looking, acoustics-aiding “bongo drums,” as Philharmonic officials call them — remains an uninviting place to attend a concert, nondescript at best. Many of the seats in the huge shoe box feel insuperably distant from the players. The color scheme is a brown that Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president, has taken to describing with an unkind expletive.

In truth, the much-invoked deficiency of the hall’s acoustics has been exaggerated. There are many, many performances — Esa-Pekka Salonen’s resplendent recent account of Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony with the Philharmonic comes to mind — at which no one in the audience could think the acoustics were problematic. Still, the sound is not ideal.