The year’s festival marked the third consecutive time that Skylands Professional Audio, headed by Mark Clifford, has provided both comprehensive sound reinforcement and live digital multi-track recording at every stage, and they’ve already been contracted to do the same at the next festival. Based in Blairstown, New Jersey, the company specializes in supplying comprehensive systems and technical support to hundreds of clients for events ranging from concerts and entertainment to corporate and industrial.

The Dodge Poetry Festival main stage, offering seating for up to 3,000, requires the largest sound reinforcement system as well as the most attention from the audio crew. The audience surrounds three sides of the stage to create a very wide coverage area, with a downward sloping concrete floor topped by a heavy-gauge vinyl fostering a highly reflective environment.

Clifford and his team deployed EAW KF730 line arrays to overcome these challenges and deliver highly articulate audio throughout the entire region. Each array also included a single EAW SB730 subwoofer expressly designed to fly within the array structure while providing the ideal low-end sonic complement to the full-range KF730’s.

“This is a situation where the KF730’s are an enormous benefit. The wide horizontal dispersion of these line arrays eliminates the need for a center cluster, which we’d previously utilized when going with a point-source loudspeaker coverage approach,” Clifford explains. “In addition, the controlled vertical dispersion, along with careful aiming of the arrays, insures that we’re able to keep energy – high-frequency energy in particular - from bouncing off and around the reflective tent surface.”

Main left and right arrays offering stereo output were flown from a truss above the front of the stage, each comprised of a single SB730 above just two KF730’s, and coverage to the expansive audience areas to each side of the stage was handled by single arrays made up of the same components. EAW KF730 Wizard software provided Clifford with an assist on array structure, cabinet count and aiming.

“We attained articulate speech reproduction right out of the gate,” notes Clifford. “Once an audience was in place, eliminating stray reflections off the concrete floor, sound was extremely clean throughout a zone that extends about 200 degrees around the stage. The best words to describe the sound quality are ‘remarkable’ and ‘amazing’.”

Clifford explains that he had originally envisioned arrays made up of four loudspeaker modules, but truss load-bearing restrictions led to subtracting one full-range module per array. Yet this proved no detraction to flawless sound reinforcement performance.

“Our experience with the KF730 is that it provides monstrous full-range output in terms of a loudspeaker of its slight scale, truly presenting a ‘less is more’ scenario,” he states. “We’ve also been attaining absolutely phenomenal results using just two- to three-box arrays in good-sized auditoriums and theatres. The KF730 is far more flexible than we’d ever imagined. It’s providing incredibly versatile, while the compact cabinet size makes them easy to load and set-up a breeze.”

Another component proving to be a big hit at several stages was EAW NT Series powered loudspeakers, offering true studio-quality reproduction in a live sound environment. Two NT29 loudspeakers proved the right fit to cover each section of an L-shaped meeting room, in addition to a single flown NT29 that was more than capable of completely covering an 80-foot-long tent. “In the past, we had to use a delay loudspeaker in this location, but this year we just didn’t need it,” Clifford notes. “The NT29 cut through crystal clear all the way to the back of the listening area.”