Question on purchasing speakers

Purchasing PA is a tricky matter and should only be done after careful deliberation. I find the price for the rental you mention on the high side.

Generally speaking rental is based on 3-4% of the purchase price of gear. Assuming 4% in this case that means you would be getting a PA (including stands and cables) worth approximately 5000 bucks (200 divided by 4 times 100). While I like and value QSC as a proper PA brand, that seems way too steep.

Including VAT this set would come to about 3.100. So unless the rental includes things like transport in both directions, it is on the high side imho. If others want to chime it, because this is obviously based on pricing in this part of the world (The Netherlands).

Another thing is that you should be able to secure some kind of discount from the rental company as you are doing their sales work. I have an understanding that gets me between 15 and 25% discount on rental gear. I then charge the customer what they would have paid if they rented directly and the rest is my payment for taking care of everything.

I could go into a detailed calculation but won’t. Suffice to say that if you want to earn some money on your investment, you would have to rent out your gear approximately twice a month at the mentioned 4% rate.

The size of the place you are playing just doesn’t warrant that kind of heavy PA nor that kind of cost.

You could look at some of the new 1 sub, 2 satellite systems that are now in their 2nd and 3rd generations. Most decidedly the new LD Systems (Curve) or the HK Audio Lucas Nano. Other brands have them as well. If you go to two smaller subs each with their own satellite, I am smitten with the RCF Evox. At a price higher than two K12s but substantially cheaper than two K10s with a KW18, you will get two 10″ subs with 5×2″ “line array” satellites. Sound quality as you’d expect from RCF as is build quality. These things are pretty loud for their size too. Easy to transport, store, setup. They take up very little floor space at the venue too. Due to the line array setup they have a better front/back spread of sound than a set of straight PA speakers.
At 400W RMS per side (total 800W) you could easily run a room up to 80-100 people.

You can even set them up in your practice room!

Should you play a place that needs bigger PA, you can always rent for that occasion.

I understand the desire to own rather than rent, but to rent for a broad range of applications, you will have to invest heavily. 3000-4000 is about the starting mark if you want quality gear. So my advice is always to rent until you are pretty confident you will rent your own gear enough for it to be a good business decision and then only buy so you can do the biggest number of your gigs. Let’s say you play parties between 40 and 500 people with the bulk being between 75-200 people. It will not pay to buy a PA ready for 500 people. It will be such overkill (both in power, room space taken up and price). You would buy a PA ready for up to 200 people. That would mean you’d still be renting the appropriately sized gear for the 200-500 people parties.

Since there is no shortcut in PA, buying sub-par gear is not really an option imho. I have been there and done that, thought it sounded ok (always knew it wasn’t pro-level) until I bought my current PA (Mackie HD series) and listened to both in an A-B comparison. I was shocked.

At the end of the day it’s your choice. I hope I gave you some (extra) things to consider so you can make the most informed decision possible.

As always just my three cents worth.

At the risk of getting flamed here or at least seriously disagreed with, brands like DAP, American DJ, Behringer and a few others are in the prosumer section of the market as far as I am concerned. They are wonderful for doing the odd party and certainly are way better than the cheap Chinese crap you can find on Amazon. They sound pretty decent, especially for their price.

But … and this is where I notice I sometimes differ from other readers … if you are going to charge people for your services and you supply the gear, I have the strong opinion that your customers have a right to expect pro-level gear.

As I said before, there are no shortcuts in PA. So you can’t compare a 300 euro DAP DRX-12 to a QSC K12 that costs 900 euro (pricing here in Holland). And there are true pro brands where that 12″ fullrange will actually cost up to 2000 euro a piece. If it were possible to get the quality of the QSC in a box the price of a DAP, everyone – including QSC – would be doing it. The trouble is that they look roughly the same on the outside. The quality difference is in the inside (electronics, drivers, enclosure quality and design) but also for a large part in the money that goes into R&D. And that makes it hard to decide.

If you look at the brands rental companies use, you will find the same names over and over, some of them “unknown” to the general public. They are top-dollar products that sound great, can endure many years on the road, have great company support for them.

At the end of the day the only true advice to give is “trust your ears”. You should not ever buy speakers without hearing them live with your own music. So if you go to a store, bring a high-quality copy of some tracks you know extremely well to play on the speakers you are looking at and if you have a shortlist, try getting them setup next to each other and do a A-B(-C) comparison. I promise you WILL hear differences.

Buying a pro-brand is a good choice, but look at the product line too. Many pro-brands feature low-budget lines as well, in order for them not to miss out in sales at that end of the spectrum.

The decision to buy or rent and if buy, what to get, is yours of course.

Here there is still quite a price gap between the two. They Yamaha’s are 675, the QSCs are 900 a piece! So a PAIR of QSC K12s for only 800 bucks sounds like a steal.

They would both be decent speakers for your purpose. An A-B comparison of them playing in the same room with the same music should make choosing easy. If they sound identical enough, you pick the cheapest, if one is clearly more likable to your ears than the other then you take that one 😀

Be sure to take into account good quality XLR cables of sufficient length (I always find that a 10 and a 15 meter one for example are better than one 25 meter one, but that is just me), good speaker stands (I have bought budget-stands and trashed them in two months and those weren’t even happy months using them) and – IMPORTANT – covers.

As for mixers, may I suggest the small Yamaha’s. If you want a built-in sound card the AG06 is a good choice, otherwise the MG06 would suit your needs. Quality is great and pricing is very good imho. The entire (audio) chain is as good as it’s weakest link. Introducing the Behringer would make it, always imho, the weakest link. I use the AG03 on my desk as my external sound card with my KRK monitors hooked up and am very pleased with the quality. I also have used the MG16 (the big brother of the MG06) semi-professionally for live sound gigs and it too is a go-to product as back-up/small gig mixer for sound engineers.