When heavy rain began pelting the closed roof at Arthur Ashe Stadium, Andy Murray couldn't pick up the usual sounds of a tennis match.
Most importantly, he said, the thwack of a ball coming off his opponent's racket strings — or his own, for that matter — was completely indiscernible during a 6-4, 6-1, 6-4 second-round victory over Marcel Granollers at the US Open on Thursday.
As it is, the new $150 million retractable cover makes the tournament's main stadium louder because the structure, even when open, traps the sounds of spectators chatting in the stands.
When it's shut, as was the case on Wednesday because of showers that delayed play on all other courts for hours at a time, the roof amplifies all of that ambient noise.
And when the drops came down early in Murray's second set, well, it was loud as can be.
"You can't hear anything, really," 2012 US Open champion Murray said. "I mean, you could hear the line calls."
But that was about it.
As Murray and Granollers played, there was a constant din during points, an amalgam of the downpour bouncing off the outside of the roof and the murmur of the crowd bouncing off the inside. From a seat in the 10th row parallel to a baseline, the racket-ball impact was rendered silent by a louder version of what you hear when you hold a seashell to your ear.
It's not simply that it's an unfamiliar soundtrack for a Grand Slam match. It affects the competition.
Because of Thursday's wet weather, action around the grounds was limited until early evening — but matches kept coming under the roof in Ashe.
Men advancing included 2009 champion Juan Martin del Potro, No 3 Stan Wawrinka, No 6 Kei Nishikori, No 8 Dominic Thiem, No 14 Nick Kyrgios and No 22 Grigor Dimitrov.
Meanwhile, Veteran Indian star leander Paes and his German partner Andre Begemann crashed out of the men's doubles competition at the US Open tennis tournament with a first round loss to Stephane Robert of France and Dudi Sela of Israel. The Indo-German duo gave a tough fight before going down 6-2, 5-7, 4-6 in one hour and 59 minutes. Robert and Sela will now take on lukasz Kubot of Poland and Alexander Peya of Austria in the second round.