Pa Hire: short for public address hire: electronic sound amplification equipment powerful enough to reach a large audience.When looking for pa hire you need to be clear on what you need to use the equipment for. For amplification of speech at a conference or other event: Firstly check out the venue - is it inside or outside? Roughly how many people are going to be addressed? What power facilities are available at the venue / site? If it’s an outdoor event then you may need to think about hiring a generator - the Pa Hire company should be able to give you advice on this and may even supply their own generators. Also think about weather proofing for mikes, amps, mixers etc. Get together as much information as possible before you make the call. The type of pa hire companies who deal with this kind of work may be quite specialised. For outdoor events the type of loudspeakers that work best for speech are pa horns. They look like big plastic trumpets. Many of these horns can be linked together and distributed across a large arena to cover tens of thousands of people. This is not the kind of equipment suited to amplifying live bands or DJ’s.

Putting on an event with amplified music is not just about renting speakers – you also need to think about Sound Equipment Hire. If you are putting on a dj event then you are going to need Sound Equipment Hire in the form of Technics record decks and/or Pioneer cd decks and a DJ Mixer. There are hundreds of different kinds of dj mixers from your basic 2 channel scratch mixers right up to 6 or 8 channel installation club mixers suited to use with up to 6 decks with mic channels for mc’s. If you are putting on a live band then Sound Equipment Hire is essential. Firstly you will need a mixing desk. These can have anything from 4 – 64 channels. You need to know how many instruments / vocals are involved in the band before you can decide how many channels you need. Some drum kits will need 16 channels on their own due to all the microphones needed. You’ll need to hire mics for vocals, horns and for mic’ing up guitar amps. In addition you will need d.i. boxes for all instruments that have a built in pick up’s, for keyboards and for the bass guitar. Then to do it properly you need outboard gear : gates / compressors, graphic and parametric equalisers and a decent digital effects processor. Monitoring is also essential for live bands so the artists can hear themselves. Unless it’s a small band in a small venue you’re much better off getting a professional live sound production company to do the whole job instead of trying to dry hire live sound equipment.

Companies offering Sound System Hire can range from very small outfits up to the biggest audio production firms in the world. Small scale operations might stock a couple of pairs of Mackie active full range speakers. These guys are there for the pub gigs or house parties. On the other end of the scale we have the major international players who could supply a massive point source solution from the likes of Funktion-One or a line array like the Martin Audio Longbow system. These are the kinds of Sound System Hire companies that Glastonbury festival would need to approach with rigs capable of delivering incredible sound quality to every single punter in a crowd of fifty thousand people. Of course whatever scale event you are planning there will be an event production companies out there who can provide a Sound System Hire service that will be just right for you.