When you’re launching a brand new show or band into the professional market, and specifically theatres, It might not have occured to you that bringing a professional company, such as Prestige, onboard might be a more cost effective option than investing heavily in tour quality equipment that will meet the needs of a professional outfit.

Our per show fees provide a huge amount of tour quality equipment, and a professional audio engineer who knows how to get the best of out of it, and your band - and this translates to a great expeirence for the audience and a great experience for the band.

But let’s just look at the costs for a second, because it’s really easy to forget that it may be incredibly difficult, or it could take an extremely long time, to recoup the investment when you’re launching a new band. Primarily because the live music market is extremely saturated with acts if you’re aiming for private hire, or if you’re launching into theatres - this is a risky area where ticket sales can be unpredictable, and shows can end up costing you money if they don’t work out financially.

We have been working in professional theatre since 2017 with touring shows, and we’ve been involved in the function market for our entire careers.

Both are hard, and we’ve worked extremely hard over the last decade or so to build a touring business that has some reliability and predictabilty.

While there is cost effective equipment out there, there are reasons why professional companies don’t tour Behringer, Alto, etc.

The equipment that we’ve specifically chosen to work with is Yamaha and RCF for our PA. The Yamaha DXR/DXS series are a small footprint PA with excellent coverage, that will happily deliver clear and punchy audio to audiences of circa 300. We double the number of boxes to enable delivering up to 900 successfully (and as much as 1200 in function room).

A PA for up to 300 of this quality will cost circa £4000, and doubling the size will be close to £8000. Believe it or not, not all professional performance venues have a fixed install PA, and playing a room you’re booked will will require you to provide one if the venue either doesn’t have one or has a substandard system.

Next you have to take into account a mixing desk. An appropriate level desk for a professional production will set you back around £2000, but it doesn’t stop there because it’s not going to give you an optimally mixed band if you’re mixing from the stage, so you’ll need to add on a Stagebox to enable to instruments to be plugged in on stage and the desk out in the auditorium (Ipads will only get you so far..!). These will add between £1000 - £2000 depending on your eco-system.

So you could comfortably be investing £7000 in just PA before you hit the stage.

But it can’t stop there, because you need to consider professional level monitoring systems.

A good quality cab can cost you in the region of £300 - £400 each, but if you’re adding 3 - 4 cabs to a stage in a small room, or on a small stage (and yess you may play big stages as well, but you have to account for all eventualities) then you engineer may have a difficult time controlling overall volumes or feedback, and that adds a lot of stress all round.

There’s a reason that professional performers use IEM systems - they provide a freedom of movement; better clarity of sound; they’re generally better for singers’; and reducing the on stage sound makes for a better engineering environment for the Engineer, and the band by extension.

But good quality, reliable, IEM systems are expensive to buy in with Channel 38 systems starting at around £500 per unit.

So after all of your costs to stage a performance, you’d need to be making circa £10k before you start making money. And any musician will tell you that that is a hard thing to do. There’s a lot of competition for work, and theatres are ever more under pressure to ensure that their seats are being sold so bringing in new shows is a huge risk to them.

And this doesn’t take into account microphones, cabling, stands, cases, etc.

It’s an expensive game!!!

Prestige Sound’s per show rate starts at £500 per show for everything required to stage a professional grade show for up to 300 people, whether you’re in a theatre or a function room, and including a professional audio engineer with a provable track record.

Our fees increase as you need more equipment, and we have our prices printed on our website in some defined audio packages that are asked for regularly to give clients clarity and predictability when working out their financial models.

www.prestigesound.co.uk

Typical audio engineer fees (that we get quoted when we reach out to freelancers for work) is around £250 per show, give or take £50.

With this in mind, you’re hiring around £14k of equipment from us for around £250 per show.

And this, we’re reliabilty reminded on the forums, is on the very low end!!! But it doesn’t effect the qualiy of our systems, service or engineers. We’re effectively resourcing professional touring shows on a weekly basis up and down the country, with all of the receipts on our Facebook page for all to see.

Enquire now to foh@prestigesound.co.uk to discuss resourcing your show for 2026 and 2027.