Mister Bean

The ease of setup and transport for a rental PA is definitely something to consider. Any tips on finding a good rental company? I've looked around a bit, but a lot were either too far away, or didn't seem reputable.

Thanks for the input, and you bring up some valid points. We haven't worked out everything yet, but it's coming along. The basic plan right now is to do three playlists, one each for cocktails, dinner and dancing. The first two will be played back on the house system for sure. Since the speakers are evenly distributed they can be played at a relatively low volume and still be easily heard by everyone throughout the place. I see no reason to do requests during cocktails or dinner, so all that will need to be done for those is connect the laptop to the wall and their system and press play. Since it's just two connections I'm sure I can find someone that can handle that, or maybe even have the caterers take care of it. The house system has a wireless mic built in, and we've got a friend that does some DJing, so he said he'd like to handle MC duties for the night. If he were to fall through, there are a couple others that I'm sure would do well with it. So that will take care of announcements and toasts. Then there's the dancing portion of the evening. This is where requests would come into play. The plan for right now is to solicit requests for the playlists prior to the wedding, and let guests know that they need to get them in now as they won't be able to make them then. I've talked to a couple other people that did it this way and had it work out well. And really, compared to the number of weddings where I've seen the DJ clear the dance floor, I think it will probably work out alright. Alternatively, I could try to find two or three people willing to watch the laptop and enter requests, but that just seems like it might be more trouble than it's worth.

I'm almost hesitant to admit this, but I have a pair of Academy speakers that I use in a stereo setup. Clearly, it's not what they're designed for, but they work pretty well. So, to my question. In a couple of months I'm getting married, and we don't feel like spending a bunch of money on a DJ that isn't going to play the music that we want. So we're doing it ourselves. We're putting together the playlist, and we've got a couple of laptops for redundancy. This just leaves the audio equipment to be figured out. There are speakers already in the place which sound decent from what I've heard so far, but they're just built into the ceiling, and maybe not quite as loud or with the frequency response you'd want for dancing. We could go out and rent a PA system, but the cost of a good one would be equivalent to a good portion of the cost of a DJ, so if we're going to spend that much, it almost seems like we'd be just as well off getting a DJ and letting them take care of the setup and tear down. Then my fiancee suggested using our home system. At first I thought, no, not a chance, they're great speakers, but just not really meant for higher volumes in such a large space. Then I started wondering whether they might actually be able to do it, particularly if I was to add a good sub to take care of the lower frequencies and make things a bit easier for them overall. Or if I was to split the output from the laptop so that we could use the inhouse speakers and the Academys simultaneously (though this makes things much, much more complicated and runs into the possibility of having something out of phase). So here's some specifics. I've got the Academys and a receiver that puts out about 110 watts per channel, a subwoofer could potentially be added. The space is an art gallery shaped like a horse shoe, approximately 3500 square feet with about eight or nine foot ceilings. The floors are wood and there are no carpets or other absorbant materials on the dancing side of the room. The dance area itself would probably be somewhere around 500 to 750 square feet, depending on how many people are over there (there will be approximately 100 people at the wedding, so if half dance, we're looking at 50). It's a big space overall, but the part where you'd want it to be loud isn't. So could this potentially be workable with the Academys, or would I just be seriously running a risk of destroying the speakers? Currently I'm leaning towards the latter, but I keep going back and forth. Thanks for any thoughts.