Show Imaging Brings Sound to Under the Big Sky Festival

Whitefish, MT (August 5, 2026)—Founded in 2019, the Under the Big Sky Festival draws big name acts and more than 20,000 music fans to Big Mountain Ranch, just outside Whitefish, Montana. This year’s edition, held in mid-July, brought the likes of Chris Stapleton, Of Monsters and Men, Ryan Bingham, Leftover Salmon, Greensky Bluegrass, Old Crow Medicine Show and others to the site.

The festival features two stages, Great Northern and Big Mountain Stage, the latter of which has audio provided by Show Imaging, which fielded a sizable JBL Professional audio system to cover the crowd.

The JBL Professional VTX system centered around the new VTX B35 cardioid subwoofer, and was also one of the first major festival deployments of the B35 subwoofer. The Big Mountain Stage featured JBL Professional VTX A12 and VTX A12W line arrays with VTX B35 flown subwoofers, complemented by ground-stacked VTX B28 subwoofers, VTX A8 loudspeakers for front-fill and outfills, and VTX M22 stage monitors. Crown I-Tech HD amplifiers powered the system throughout the venue.

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Unusually, the Big Mountain Stage is constructed each year on an active ranch with little permanent infrastructure. The stage plays to one of the ranch’s natural hillsides, with a creek dividing the flat audience area from the elevated hillside, creating a natural amphitheater. Because site restrictions ruled out delay towers, the approximately 350-foot throw and more than 30 feet of elevation change had to be covered entirely from the main P.A.

Show Imaging designed the system around the JBL Professional VTX B35 cardioid subwoofers, helping direct bass energy toward the audience while minimizing sound behind the stage and maintaining the festival’s commitment to being a good neighbor.

Taylor Wade, Technical Director at Show Imaging, remarked, “We’ve been doing this festival for several years, and this was the best coverage we’ve had without delay hangs. We had consistent low-frequency coverage all the way to the top of the hillside, and we didn’t receive a single noise complaint during the festival, which is significant for an event of this scale. It speaks to the quality of the system and its ability to put the sound where you want it instead of where you don’t.”