If you’re putting on a festival — even a small one — and you’ve never run an audio brief before, this is the timeline we wish every event organiser worked to. None of it is unique to us; it’s just the order things actually need to happen so that load-in day isn’t a panic.

Whether your festival is 500 people in a field or 10,000 across multiple stages, the steps are roughly the same. Smaller events compress the timeline, larger ones stretch it. Use this as a baseline and adapt to your scale.

12 weeks out: site visit, scope, contract

This is when the audio side of the festival should start getting locked in. By now you should know:

Festival date and footprint
Number of stages
Headline acts (or at least which slots are filled)
Approximate audience numbers per stage
Site location and any access constraints
Your overall event manager / production manager

What we (or any decent audio supplier) need from you at this stage:

A site visit. We come to the venue, walk the stages, look at access, check power. Free, no obligation, but absolutely essential for any outdoor festival in an unfamiliar venue.
Stage scope. Even rough numbers — “main stage 2,000-cap, second stage 500, dance tent 800”. We can spec from this.
Contract / deposit terms agreed. This is the point at which we hold dates, kit and crew exclusively for you.

What you should expect from us:

Initial spec proposal
Quote with line-by-line breakdown
Insurance and PAT documentation
Method statement template

8 weeks out: stage plan, channel list, rider review

Now things get specific. By 8 weeks out, your headline acts should have submitted technical riders. These are documents from each band’s production manager listing exactly what they need — number of microphones, console preferences, monitor configuration, RF requirements, any specialist kit.

What we need from you:

Final stage plan for each stage — where the band, drum riser, monitor desk, FOH desk, screens, crowd barrier all sit.
All band riders — even rough drafts. We’ll review them, flag conflicts, and tell you what’s standard vs what’s an upcharge.
Lighting / video supplier details — so we can coordinate cabling, power, and shared infrastructure.

What we’ll do:

Detailed input lists for each act
Stage patch sheets
Monitor mix breakdown
RF coordination plan if there are 8+ wireless channels
Updated quote reflecting any rider items

Common pitfall: event organisers think the rider is for the band’s benefit only. It’s not — it’s the contract for what the venue/promoter (you) provides. Read every rider in full, and if something’s unrealistic for your budget, push back early. By 8 weeks out, you can still negotiate. By 2 weeks out, you can’t.

4 weeks out: power plan, RAMS, schedule

This is the operational planning phase. Everyone now knows what they’re doing on the day; this is where we make sure they can actually do it.

What we need from you:

Power plan. What’s coming from mains, what’s coming from generators, where the distribution is, who’s the duty electrician. We’ll feed you our power requirement (in kW per stage) so you can size generators correctly.
Site schedule. Hour-by-hour load-in, sound check slots, doors open, set times, changeovers, get-out.
RAMS (Risk Assessment and Method Statement) — you need to provide your overarching event RAMS, we provide ours for the audio scope.
Crew list — who’s allowed in production area, when, with which passes.

What we’ll do:

Submit our crew list with names, roles, and arrival times
Submit equipment manifest (for venues that require it)
Confirm transport and overnight accommodation if needed
Final RF frequency coordination — especially if you’ve got multiple bands with their own RF

Common pitfall: under-spec’d power. The single most common reason a festival stage goes silent is the generator running at 95% capacity and tripping on a transient. We’ll tell you what we need; trust the number, don’t try to economise on the gen.

2 weeks out: final input list, crew, transport

The last sprint. By now everything should be fixed; this is the dotting-i’s, crossing-t’s phase.

What we need from you:

Confirmed set times — final, signed off by all artists.
Final input list — any last-minute changes from the bands.
Stage manager appointed for each stage (yours or theirs).
Production office location confirmed.
Crew catering plan — yes, this matters. Tired, hungry crew make mistakes.

What we’ll do:

Lock in all crew bookings
Confirm transport schedule (lorries, vans, driver hours)
Pre-flight all kit in our warehouse — every cable, every mic, every console firmware
Final brief to our crew

Common pitfall: forgetting that festival crew work very long days. A 12-hour load-in plus 14-hour show day plus 6-hour load-out is not unusual. Your timeline needs to account for driver hours, rest breaks, and contingency for delays — especially if access is tight.

Day-of: load-in, line check, sound check, show

This is the day everything you’ve planned has to actually happen. The hour-by-hour rhythm:

Load-in (typically 5–10 hours before doors)

Trucks arrive, kit is unloaded in patch order
PA is built and flown / stacked
Console and stage cabling run
Power-up and basic checks

Line check (2–4 hours before doors)

Every input, every microphone, every channel tested
Stage monitors confirmed
RF channels scanned and tested
Recording / streaming feeds confirmed

Sound checks (1–3 hours before doors)

Each band gets a slot in their order — usually headliner first, then down the bill
Each band confirms levels, monitor mix, in-ear feeds
We balance the FOH mix

Doors and show

Crew on stand-by at FOH and monitor positions throughout
Quick changeovers between bands (typically 15–30 minutes)
Stage tech available for any in-show issues

Get-out (often into the small hours)

De-rig in reverse order
Kit packed, manifest checked
Site cleared, often by sunrise

What we need from you on the day:

One named contact on radio, in person, throughout
Decision-making authority for last-minute changes
Access to all areas of the site
Hot drinks and crew meal at scheduled break

After the event: post-event audit

Often skipped, but the smart festival organisers do this. Within a week of the event:

30-minute call to review what worked and what didn’t
Note any kit damage and how it happened
Note any wins — engineers who delivered, kit choices that paid off
Note any things to change for next year — power, access, monitor positions

Save the notes somewhere you’ll find them again 11 months from now. Year-on-year improvement on festivals comes from honest debriefs, nothing else.

Common pitfalls (the ones that genuinely sink festivals)

RF planning left too late. Eight wireless mics in the same field need 8 different frequencies. Twenty wireless mics need a coordinator. Plan for it 8 weeks out, not on the day.
Underestimated power. As above — get our number, trust it, size the gen up not down.
No weather contingency. A line array is essentially a sail. If it gets too windy, it has to come down. Have a wet-weather plan.
No comms between disciplines. Audio, lighting, video, staging and power need to talk to each other from week 12 onwards. A weekly production call is the cheapest insurance you’ll buy.
Ignoring rider items because “we’ll sort it on the day”. You won’t. Sort it 4 weeks out.

Your job vs ours

To save you re-reading: here’s the split.

Your responsibility (event organiser):

Site, footprint, stages, audience capacity
Bookings (acts, contracts, rider negotiation)
Power infrastructure (mains/gen)
Site safety and licences
Crew passes, schedule, catering
Overall production manager / point of contact

Our responsibility (audio supplier):

All audio kit, including spares
Specification per stage and per act
Crew (FOH, monitors, stage techs, RF coordinator)
RF planning and coordination
Audio-specific RAMS
Setup, operation, de-rig
Recording / streaming feeds if scoped

If you’re new to this, we’ll guide you through the bits on your side too. We’ve been doing it long enough that the patterns are familiar.

Useful next reads

Ready to talk?

Planning a festival and want to start the conversation? Send us the basics — date, site, stages, headliners — and we’ll come back within one working day to set up a site visit.

“What size PA do I need for X people?” is one of the most common questions we get, and there’s no clean one-line answer. A 200-person speech in a boardroom and a 200-person rock band in an outdoor field need completely different rigs. But there are useful rules of thumb, and once you know them you can have a much more useful conversation with whoever’s quoting your event.

This is the guide we wish more event organisers had read before getting their first quote. None of it is rocket science — you just need to think about a few variables together rather than focusing on headcount alone.

The headcount-only myth

Most online “PA size calculators” base their answer purely on audience size. That’s misleading. Two events with the same headcount can need wildly different systems depending on:

Indoor or outdoor
Music genre (DJ, acoustic, full live band, speech-only)
Room shape and acoustics
Whether the audience is seated or standing
Whether you want background-loud or full concert-loud

We’ll walk through each tier of audience size below, then layer the other variables on top.

Up to 50 people — boardroom, small wedding ceremony, intimate gathering

For a small audience in a controlled indoor space, you usually don’t need much. A pair of compact powered speakers (think 8″ or 10″ tops), a small mixer, a couple of wireless mics. Sometimes a single speaker is enough.

For a wedding ceremony of 50 outside, the answer is the same kit but with battery power if there’s no mains, plus a backup. Outdoor halves what your speakers can do, so you’d choose slightly bigger ones than you would indoors.

Common mistake at this size: trying to use the venue’s built-in PA. Hotel function-room speakers are usually fine for music between courses but terrible for speeches. A wireless lapel mic into your own small system is night and day.

50–150 people — function room, corporate breakout, small wedding reception

Now you need a PA that can fill a room and stay clean at the back. Typically: a pair of 12″ or 15″ powered tops on stands, possibly a sub-bass cabinet or two if there’s any music heavier than background, a small digital mixer, and three or four channels of wireless mic.

If there’s a live band — even a three-piece — bump up the spec. Bands need stage monitoring (so the musicians can hear themselves), more channels (drums alone are usually 6–8 mics), and more PA headroom because the audience’s expectation of “concert volume” is louder than they’d think.

Common mistake at this size: under-spec’ing for live music. A pair of 12″ tops can do a piano-and-vocal duo all night. Put a four-piece function band through them and they’ll either sound thin or die mid-set.

150–500 people — conference, banquet, small festival stage

This is where line array starts to enter the conversation, but isn’t always the right answer. For a 300-person conference with speeches and one performer, a pair of bigger tops (15″ or large 12″) with subs is plenty. For a 300-person seated dinner with a band and dancing, same.

For 300+ people standing at a festival or club night with a DJ or full band — different territory. You want stacks at the front of stage with proper sub-bass, distributed delays if the audience is more than about 25m deep, and a digital console with enough channels for everything plus some headroom.

Stage monitoring becomes mandatory at this size for any live music — wedge speakers for the band, or in-ear monitors for the more demanding acts.

Common mistake at this size: assuming the same kit that worked for last year’s smaller event will scale. It rarely does, especially outdoors.

500–2,000 people — mid-size festival stage, concert, large conference

Almost always line array territory now. A small line array (8–12 boxes per side) with proper sub-bass, ground-stacked or flown depending on the venue. A larger console (32+ channels), proper monitoring with a dedicated monitor engineer for the bigger bookings, and more crew on the day.

For an outdoor stage at this size, weather protection (covers, tents) is mandatory. You also need to think about how far back the audience extends — beyond about 30m you’ll need delay speakers further back to keep the audio coherent.

If your event is mostly speech-led (a 1,500-person conference), the spec is smaller — but still line array for clean coverage, and proper RF planning for the wireless mics.

Common mistake at this size: trying to save money by skipping the monitor engineer. With a band of any complexity, a separate monitor engineer is essential — the FOH (front-of-house) engineer can’t do both jobs at once.

2,000+ people — large festival, headline concert

Specialist territory. Big line array systems, large-format consoles, full crew, multiple stage techs, RF coordinator, dedicated patch tech. Costs scale up because everything scales up.

Honestly: at this size you shouldn’t be picking a supplier from a website guide. Get three or four working production companies in for site visits, look at their previous work at this scale, ask for technical riders, and compare on capability not price.

Indoor vs outdoor: the multiplier

Take whatever spec you’d have indoors and roughly double it for outdoor. The exact ratio depends on the site, but the underlying physics is the same: indoors, your sound bounces off walls and ceiling and helps you fill the space; outdoors, every dB of sound pressure has to come from your speakers.

Outdoor jobs also need:

More sub-bass (low frequencies dissipate fast in open air)
Weather protection
Bigger generators / more power
Often a stage or risers
Wind contingency for line array (tall arrays act as sails)

If you’re moving from an indoor venue to an outdoor field at the same headcount, expect the kit list to roughly double and the price to go up significantly.

Music genre matters more than you’d think

A 300-person event can be:

Speech-only conference — 2 wireless mics, modest PA, low monitoring needs
Acoustic singer + pianist — 4 mic channels, modest PA, basic monitors
Function band (5-piece with rhythm section) — 16+ channels, decent PA, full monitoring
DJ-led club night — fewer channels, but big sub-bass and high SPL handling
Rock band, full backline — 24+ channels, big PA, multiple monitor mixes

Same audience size, five completely different jobs. Tell whoever’s quoting what’s happening on stage, not just how many people are watching.

Stage monitoring: what the band hears

Stage monitoring is the system that lets musicians and speakers hear themselves and each other on stage. It’s invisible to the audience but absolutely critical for performance quality.

Two flavours:

Wedge monitors — speakers angled up at the performers from the front of stage. Cheaper, simpler, fine for most events.
In-ear monitors (IEMs) — small earpieces feeding each musician their own custom mix wirelessly. Used by all professional bands. More expensive, more complex (RF coordination), but vastly better sound quality on stage.

For speech and presentation events, you usually don’t need monitors at all — the speakers can hear the room.

For any band beyond a duo, you need something — even a single shared wedge is better than nothing. For professional bands, IEMs are usually a requirement on the rider.

Common mistakes we see

Under-spec’ing the headroom. Booking a system that’s “just enough” for the audience size means it’ll be working at its limit all night. It’ll sound stressed and break things faster. Always spec a bit larger than the minimum.
Forgetting outdoor needs more. “We did this last year indoors and it was great” — and now you’re outdoors and it’s nowhere near loud enough.
Ignoring the room shape. Long, narrow rooms (like the typical hotel function suite) need distributed speakers, not one big stack at the front.
Skipping stage monitoring for live music. Musicians can’t perform if they can’t hear themselves. Audience pays the price.
Asking for a price before describing the show. “How much for a PA for 200 people?” produces a useless answer. “200 people, mid-March in a marquee, four-piece function band 7pm to 11pm, with a couple of speeches at 8pm” gets you a real number first time.

How to figure out what you need (quickly)

If you’re not sure what spec you need, the fastest way is to call us and have a 5-minute conversation. We’ll ask:

How many people?
Indoor or outdoor?
What’s happening on stage? (speech / DJ / acoustic / band / mix of things)
Is the venue helping with kit, or are we bringing everything?
Any specifics — recording, streaming, multiple stages, particular bands with riders?

Five minutes of that gets us 90% of the way to a quote. The remaining 10% is venue-specific and we’ll cover it in a site visit if needed.

Useful next reads

If you’re at the start of planning, you might also want:

Ready to talk?

Got an event coming up and want a properly spec’d quote? Tell us about it here — give us the bullet points above and we’ll come back with options within one working day.

If you’ve ever asked a PA hire company for a price and got back a blank quote form instead of a number, you’re not alone. Most companies — including us — won’t put prices on the website. That’s not because we’re hiding anything. It’s because the same headcount can be five completely different jobs.

A 100-person speech in a hotel boardroom needs a couple of wireless mics and a small powered speaker. A 100-person outdoor wedding ceremony in a field needs a battery-powered system, weatherproofing, longer cable runs and a contingency plan for the wind picking up. Same audience, very different kit, very different price.

So instead of fake “from £” numbers, here’s what actually moves the price up and down. Read this before asking for a quote and you’ll get a more accurate one — and you’ll know whether the number you’re given is fair.

1. Audience size and venue type

This is the biggest single factor, and it’s two things in one. Audience size decides how much sound pressure (volume, basically) the system needs to produce — a 50-person room and a 500-person room need different rigs even if they’re both indoors.

Venue type decides what kind of system. A reverberant church needs different speakers from a soft-furnished function suite. An outdoor field with no walls to bounce sound off needs roughly twice the wattage of the same audience indoors. A long, narrow marquee needs distributed speakers down its length, not one big stack at the front.

When you ask for a quote, tell us both: how many people, and where. “120 in the orangery at Rhinefield House” gives us much more to work with than “120 people”.

2. Indoor vs outdoor

Outdoor jobs are almost always more expensive than the indoor equivalent, and not by a small margin. There are good reasons for that:

More amplification (no walls or ceilings helping the sound)
Weather protection — covers, tents, contingency
Longer cable runs across grass or hardstanding
More power infrastructure, often with a generator
Sometimes a stage or tower
Higher contingency for things going wrong (rain, wind, generator failure)

If your event is outdoors and the budget doesn’t quite stretch, ask whether a marquee or covered area would change the spec. Sometimes it does.

3. Engineer or dry hire

A “wet hire” includes an experienced engineer to set up, sound check, mix the show, and pack down at the end. A “dry hire” is just the kit — you (or your team) operate it.

Dry hire is cheaper, sometimes substantially so. It’s the right call if you’ve got a competent engineer of your own, like an in-house AV manager, a touring band’s FOH engineer, or a regular sound tech you trust.

It’s the wrong call if the answer to “who’s going to mix it?” is “we’ll figure that out on the day”. A bad mix on good kit sounds worse than a good mix on basic kit, and we’ve been called in to rescue plenty of events where someone well-meaning was out of their depth. The engineer day-rate is usually a small fraction of your total event budget — it’s the wrong place to economise.

4. The specific kit list

Within “PA hire” there’s a huge range. Some of the things that bump the price up:

Line array systems — what you’ll see at any decent festival or concert. More expensive than point-source PAs because the kit is more expensive and takes longer to rig.
In-ear monitors (IEMs) — preferred by professional musicians but adds RF complexity and per-musician cost.
Wireless microphone count — every additional channel of RF needs its own receiver, frequency coordination and a backup. Eight wireless mics costs significantly more than two.
Recording or live-streaming feeds — clean splits, recorders, encoders.
Stage monitoring with multiple mixes — bigger console, more wedges or IEMs, more time on the line check.

Tell us what you actually need. If you’re not sure, describe the show — “rock band, full backline, four vocalists, in-ears, recording for the band’s archive” — and we’ll spec it.

5. Distance, access and duration

Where the venue is matters. Events within Hampshire, Sussex, Surrey and west London are the easiest for us — short transport, no overnight crew. Further afield costs more because of mileage, longer crew days, and sometimes overnight accommodation.

Access at the venue matters too. A loading bay next to the stage is the cheapest scenario. A 200m push down a gravel track to a marquee in a field needs more crew time and sometimes a Land Rover. We’ll always do a site visit for anything non-standard, which is included in the quote.

Duration affects price linearly: a 2-hour conference is one job, a 3-day festival is much bigger because of crew shifts, overnight security on the kit, and the wear and tear of running a system for 36 hours straight.

6. Power and infrastructure

For most indoor events, mains is fine and we just plug in. For larger or outdoor events you need to know:

How much power is available?
What kind of connections (13A, 16A, 32A, 63A three-phase)?
Where are the sockets relative to where the PA is going?

If the venue can’t supply the power you need, we’ll spec a generator. That’s an extra line item but it’s the right call — the worst thing that can happen at a live event is the power dropping out mid-show.

If you’re not sure what the venue has, ask them — or ask us to ask them. It’s a five-minute call that prevents a lot of headaches.

7. Time of year and lead time

Summer is the busiest season for outdoor events, and weekend rates in June, July, August and September are the highest of the year. December gets busy too with corporate Christmas parties.

Lead time also matters. A booking three to six months out gives us flexibility — we can plan crew, hold kit, line everything up. A booking three weeks out means we’re juggling other jobs, paying premium rates to get crew in, and may have to sub-hire kit to fulfil it. Late bookings cost more.

If you can plan ahead, you should. If you can’t, just tell us — we’d rather give you a fair late-booking price than have you assume we can’t help.

8. What’s not in the price

A good quote includes everything you need on the day: kit, crew, delivery, set-up, de-rig, PAT-tested equipment, public liability insurance, and method statement / risk assessment if you need them. There shouldn’t be surprise extras.

Things that aren’t usually in a PA hire price (but you might think they are):

Lighting — usually a separate quote, sometimes a separate company.
Video / projection — same.
Power infrastructure beyond what the venue provides — generators, distribution, cabling. We can supply or recommend, but it’s a separate line item.
Stages and rigging — small risers we might have, full stages we won’t.
PRS for Music licence — you organise that with PRS directly if your event is public-facing with music.

Ask up front. Any decent supplier will tell you exactly what is and isn’t included.

How to get an accurate quote in one email

If you want a tight, accurate price first time, send us this:

Date of the event
Venue (name and town)
Number of people
Indoor or outdoor
What’s happening: speeches, live band, DJ, ceremony, awards, etc.
Start and finish times
Anything unusual — outdoor in March, very specific kit request, recording, multiple stages

That’s enough for us to come back with a real number, not a placeholder. The whole exchange usually takes one round of email.

Ready to talk?

If you’ve got an event on the horizon and want a quote rather than another guide, tell us about it here — we’ll come back within one working day with a proper number and a clear breakdown of what’s included.