"Hear! Hear!" by Ed Sessa

Constructor's Comments

This puzzle's structure is similar to one I used for the last Valentine's Day Wall Street Journal puzzle.  In this case the choices for theme entries were quite a bit broader but limited by the fact that the sounds had to be able to be clued without referencing the sounds themselves.  For me, the fun part of the completed puzzle is going around the border reciting the cacophony of words.

Editor's Comments

Ed's theme today is both ambitious and masterfully executed!  As if surrounding the border with sounds weren't hard enough, he kicked the theme up a notch by ensuring that all the sounds had non-sound cluing angles.  Ed even found room for the reveal SURROUND SOUND—wow!  Border themes like this are notoriously brutal from a fill standpoint, since every small section has at least one constraint.  Ed was smart to push the word count up to 80 in order to keep the crossings maximally smooth.  The maximum word count for themed puzzles is normally 78, but I honestly don't mind when constructors go up to 80 every once in a while, especially for a highly constrained theme like this one.