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Getting sound right in a school hall or village hall is mostly a question of matching the system to the room. Too small and the back rows strain to hear; too big and you have spent money on kit that never gets used above half. Our PA hire runs from a single Alto TS210 for a speech day or a small studio, up to a full-range rig with subs for a musical. Hire it and run it yourselves, or ask for a technician to set it up and operate the show.
Twelve headworn radio mics, desk, stagebox and floor mics — the musical, mic'd in one hire.
£350 / day
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Tops, subs, stands and cabling — a complete PA for bigger halls.
£70 / day
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Two speakers, stands and a mixer for classrooms and small halls.
£25 / day
View & check datesActive speakers singly or in pairs — plug in and go.
from £10 / day
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A 15 inch active sub that puts the weight back into music your tops cannot carry alone.
£20 / day
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The step-up 15-inch box for louder rooms and fuller music.
£30 / day
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Clear acrylic panels that cut the drum spill so the desk gets the mix back.
£25 / day
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The straightforward fix when the speakers are fine and the amp is not.
£20 / day
View & check datesA compact 2.1 PA with all the power in the sub and the whole system in a car boot.
£100 / day
View & check datesThe first question is not how many watts you need. It is how big the room is and how many people are in it. A hall holding 200 for a prize-giving is a different job from the same hall with a band in it. As a rough guide, a pair of 10-inch tops on stands covers a few hundred people for speech and backing tracks. That is the Small PA Package: two Alto TS210s and a mixer at £25 a day. Once you have live vocals over a band, or a room where the back wall feels a long way off, the 15-inch boxes in the Full-Range PA Package make more sense. Height matters as much as power. Speakers on stands, above head height, reach the back rows. On the floor, they mostly warm the first three rows.
Speech needs clarity in the mid-range and not much else. A single TS210 on a stand will carry a head teacher with a lapel mic in a small hall. Recorded music asks more. Backing tracks carry real bass, and dancers key off the beat, so the system has to hold together at level. Two TS210s and a mixer suit a studio show or a modest hall; a bigger room wants TS315 tops. Musical theatre is a different scale of problem. You are balancing a dozen or more radio mics against a band or a click track, and each one has to sit above the music without feeding back. That is what the School Musical Sound Package is for: a complete system rather than boxes you piece together on the morning.
Subs are about content, not volume. For a play, a speech day or a choral concert, they add nothing you want; the money is better spent getting the tops in the right place. Where subs earn their keep is dance, modern band arrangements and produced backing tracks. The TS215S covers the bottom octaves, down to around 35 Hz, and takes that work off the tops, which then run cleaner through the vocal range. That is the real gain: not more bass, but clearer voices. If you are not sure, ring us and describe the show. We would rather talk you out of subs you do not need.
Most school halls were built for assemblies and PE, not performance. Hard floors, block walls, a high ceiling and almost nothing soft: the result is a long reverberation time and speech that smears. Fill it with 300 people in coats and it changes again. No PA fixes a reverberant hall, but the right choices help. Keep the speakers forward of the front row so sound goes into the audience rather than off the back wall. Aim them down at heads, not across the room. Resist turning everything up — in a live room, more level usually means less intelligibility. Layout matters as well. A long, narrow hall behaves quite differently from a square one, so tell us the shape.
Active speakers need mains at the speaker position. In many halls that means a cable run to the nearest socket, so check where your sockets are before the day. A full musical rig needs more planning around distribution. Think about the mixer position too. Sound mixed from the wings or a corridor is sound the operator cannot hear, and it rarely comes out right. A position out in the room, roughly a third of the way back, is worth losing two seats for. Be honest about who is driving it. If nobody on your team has mixed radio mics before, show day is not the time to learn.
| Item | Rate |
|---|---|
| School Musical Sound Package | £350 / day |
| Full-Range PA Package | £70 / day |
| Small PA Package | £25 / day |
| Alto TS210 Active Speaker | £10 / day |
| Alto TS315 Active Speaker | £17.50 / day |
| Alto TS215S Active Subwoofer | £20 / day |
| EV ZLX-15P Active Speaker | £30 / day |
| Drum Screen | £25 / day |
| Crown XLi 1500 Power Amplifier | £20 / day |
| LD Systems Dave 12 System (Sub + 2 Tops) | £100 / day |
Rates are per day and exclude VAT. Ask us about multi-day and show-week rates, delivery, and hiring with a technician.
Tell us the room and the show. Rough dimensions, how many people you are expecting, and whether it is speech, recorded music or live singers over a band. That is usually enough for us to point you at the right one. If we think a smaller package will do the job, we will say so.
Yes, hire prices are per day. Tell us your load-in and get-out dates rather than just the show date, and we will quote against the period you actually need the kit.
Not necessarily. The Small PA Package is straightforward — plug in, set levels, go. Once you are into radio mics and a musical, an operator makes a real difference, and we can supply a technician with any hire. That is often the simplest route if you have no in-house technical team.
Usually, if the tracks are modern and produced. Dance work lives on the low end, and a pair of TS215S subs under the TS315 tops gives you that without pushing the tops harder than they want to go. For ballet showcases, tap or anything largely acoustic, tops on their own are normally fine.
Also for hire: sound desk hire · radio microphone hire · stage lighting hire · smoke, haze and effects hire · wired microphone hire · power and cabling hire · av and video hire
Not sure which is right for your venue? Tell us about the show and we will recommend what suits it.
Call 0333 404 0621, email sales@1stintheatre.co.uk, or send us the details of your production.
Related: Dance shows · Theatre production · Live events · Venue support
