Metinteractive, a New York State-certified Women-Owned Business Enterprise specializing in audio, video and IT design and integration for entertainment venues, 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.
In May, USA Today named the Pavilion at Bethel Woods the number one amphitheater in the United States for the second consecutive year, judging that cited the venue's acoustics alongside its setting in the Catskills. Bethel Woods went into that season, its 20th, tearing out the sound system on its lawn.
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, which Bethel Woods has deliberately kept undeveloped, and which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2017. 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,” said James P. Reilly, Senior Director of Production at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. “Every decision made was the right one. We couldn’t have done it without EAW bending over backwards to make sure we had the inventory we needed and the Metinteractive team who knew how under the gun we were and were so mission driven. 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!”
The design's least visible feature is the one the venue is most likely to thank it for. 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," said Richard Gold, who led the technical design for Metinteractive. "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 installation was engineered to keep time on site to a minimum to be ready for the season opener.
"The speakers are passive, so all the intelligence stays in the rack," Gold said. "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: twelve EAW RSX208L powered three-way line array modules and four RSX218 dual-18-inch powered subwoofers, with flybars, flight cases, caster pallets, distro and cabling. It is a self-contained system the venue can deploy for outfill, festival stages, and events across its 1,000-acre campus without touching the main rig.
The upgrade was funded in significant part through New York State arts funding, with Bethel Woods, a 501(c)(3) cultural nonprofit, pursuing capital support through the New York State Council on the Arts.
Metinteractive's certification as a New York State Women-Owned Business Enterprise was a material part of the picture. New York's Article 15-A program, reauthorized through July 1, 2028, raised the state's discretionary purchasing threshold for certified MWBE and SDVOB firms to $1.5 million, one of several mechanisms the state uses to channel public and publicly funded spending toward certified firms. For a grant-funded institution assembling a capital project, working with a certified WBE strengthens the application and simplifies the award path.
"Certification opens a door. It doesn't hang a loudspeaker," said Rachel Mele, CEO of Metinteractive. "Being a New York State WBE gave Bethel Woods a cleaner path to putting state money to work, and that matters when you're a nonprofit trying to move a capital project. But nobody keeps a contract because of a certificate. We got this one because we could hang eight arrays on a hillside that fights you and make it sound like one system. There are a lot of venues like Bethel Woods in this state: historic, nonprofit, working season to season. We'd like to do more of them."
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.
"Jim knew exactly what he wanted, and he never blinked on it, which made our job a lot easier," said Jeffrey Mele, CCO of Metinteractive. "This was grant money and a nonprofit's budget, so every line got justified twice. That's how it should work. What's hanging on that hillside now will still be current a decade out, and that's the real measure of whether the money was well spent. And you're working a quarter-mile from the field where Woodstock happened. Everybody in live sound knows what that means. Getting to be the ones who make this place sound right is not a normal Tuesday."
Reilly reported 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 said. “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.”