Metinteractive Rebuilds the Lawn System at Bethel Woods, Woodstock Site

	"The way EAW and Metinteractive tuned the system, everyone has nearly the same experience from the bottom to the top of the lawn. It blew me away," says Reilly.

Metinteractive has completed a full rebuild of the lawn sound system at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, the outdoor amphitheater at the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock festival.

The Pavilion seats 4,500 under cover, with room for another 10,500 on a natural sloping lawn. It sits about a quarter mile from the original festival field. The lawn is one of the harder listening environments in regional touring, a long throw over a changing grade on an open-air site where humidity moves the response night to night. Until this summer, it was covered by ten two-box loudspeaker clusters dating to the venue's earlier generation of technology.

Metinteractive removed those clusters and replaced them with eight-line arrays flown at the lawn's existing column lines, 64 EAW KF210 elements in all, eight per position. The KF210 is a passive two-way array element with 90-by-12-degree coverage and an IP55 rating, built on polyurea-coated Baltic birch with corrosion-resistant hardware for permanent outdoor service. Each array is paired with an EAW MK2326-WP wide-coverage downfill to cover the near field beneath it, so listeners at the front of each zone hear the same tonal balance as those at the back.

Amplification comes from 17 EAW UXA4416-D amplifiers, four channels at 4,000 watts each, with primary and secondary Dante, 96 kHz floating-point DSP, and FIR filters tuned for the KF Series. Signal management runs on a redundant pair of QSC Q-SYS Core 24F processors with a touchscreen at the rack, feeding a redundant switch fabric.

"We got the go-ahead for the install just three weeks from the first show of our summer season, so it was a marathon," says James P. Reilly, senior director of production at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. "It was also instrumental to have had the input of our acousticians, Mark Holden and Ben Bausher of Jaffe Holden, who kept the process moving forward."

Reilly pointed out that the venue has "a beautifully sloped open sitting lawn. The humidity moves on you over the course of a night, and for years we were chasing it. Under certain conditions we couldn't get any sound pressure on the top quarter of the lawn, and that became an issue. With loudspeaker technology getting exponentially better, we realized we needed to make the transition from point source to line array technology.

"The difference in sound clarity and the uniform sound pressure across the lawn is now light years ahead of where we were. The way EAW and Metinteractive tuned the system, everyone has nearly the same experience from the bottom to the top of the lawn. It blew me away -- when the system was first fired up, the sound was incredible!"

Every amplifier carries both a Dante feed and an analog backup, with a pilot tone on the network path. If the network connection fails mid-show, the amplifiers fall over to analog automatically. When the pilot tone returns, they switch back to Dante.

Metinteractive's engineering team tested the transition repeatedly on-site during commissioning, in the rack and on the network the system runs on every night. "You don't get to troubleshoot a network problem in front of 10,500 people," says Richard Gold, who led the technical design. "So, we tested it the way it's going to live, on site, in the rack it runs in. We pulled the network on it over and over, trying to make it stumble. Every time, it moved to the analog backup and then recovered back to the network feed on its own. If you weren't watching the front panel, you wouldn't know it happened."

"The speakers are passive, so all the intelligence stays in the rack," Gold says. "We reused the wiring that was already there, rewired the amp rack for the new amplifiers, and built the harnesses ahead of time so the existing NL8 runs would land straight onto the new cabinets. The goal was that the venue's own crew could hang and wire eight arrays without waiting on us for anything."

Alongside the permanent installation, Bethel Woods took delivery of a fully independent portable audio package: 12 EAW RSX208L powered three-way line array modules and four RSX218 dual-18" powered subwoofers, with flybars, flight cases, caster pallets, distro and cabling. It can deploy for out fill, festival stages, and events across its 1,000-acre campus without touching the main rig.

Metinteractive worked on site with the Bethel Woods production staff through installation and commissioning, including configuration, cabling, labeling, and updated rack documentation, so the venue's own team can operate and maintain the system independently.

Reilly reports that when the Bethel Woods staff heard the first show, they told him, "You nailed it!" And right out of the gate, guest surveys noted the improved sound quality on the lawn. "The new system has definitely made its mark with our customers," he says. "The stars aligned on this one. We were under the gun when we started, and we ended up with a product that amazes me and could not have been better."