What are some typical rental costs for sound and lighting gear?

[Stevens R. Miller]

A group I am working with is considering the old "rental vs. buy" question, but none of us really knows what it costs to rent sound and light gear. Looking around on the Web, it seems that the almost universal practice for providers of rental gear is to respond to a potential customer's e-mail with a quote. Thing is, we're not actually going to rent anything in the near future. We'd just like to know the ballpark costs for renting some of the commonly used stuff in our plays, like active speakers, mixers, wireless mikes, floor mikes, stage monitors, follow spots, DMX consoles, and the like. So, it feels kind of cheesy to make up a list of things we aren't really going to rent, just to put some vendor to the trouble of assembling a quote we know we aren't going to use right now.

Instead, I'd be grateful if folks here would just post about their experiences with renting the kinds of things I've described. What did you rent, for how long, and what did it cost?

Thanks in advance for this guidance.

 

[Footer]

It really comes down to how long you are going to hang onto the gear. The most expensive part of the rental for the shop is prepping the gear, getting it to you, taking it away, and putting it away when it gets back to the shop. So, the longer you hang onto it the cheaper the rental will be.

Come up with a gear list and get a quote. Be upfront with the rental house. Odds are that rental house will also provide you with a quote for purchase if you like. It is really not that much work for them to push out a quick quote. For me, I don't have a good shop here in town. So, no matter what I have to roll a truck at least 2 hours. That changes the prices I pay for gear wildly vs what you might pay.

 

[Stevens R. Miller]

It really comes down to how long you are going to hang onto the gear.

Our shows pretty much all run for two weekends. We always do load-in on the Saturday before tech-week, then we have tech-week, a show on Friday, two shows on Saturday, a show on the following Friday, two shows on the following Saturday, then we strike. For a variety of reasons, we don't work or perform on Sundays. So, we'd need whatever we rented for 16 days, starting on a Saturday, returning it three Sundays later.

For me, I don't have a good shop here in town. So, no matter what I have to roll a truck at least 2 hours. That changes the prices I pay for gear wildly vs what you might pay.

Hey, if it will save us money, we don't mind a drive, and we have trucks. What kind of prices are you getting for basic stuff?

 

[soundlight]

Rental prices are incredibly regional. Something that costs $100 in one region could easily cost $250 in another region. If you rent from a place in DC you could get a very different price than if you drive south to a shop. Seriously, any rental house will be glad to provide you a quote. As Kyle said, just be up front with them about the fact that you're not looking to rent, just know for future reference.

 

[Footer]

Our shows pretty much all run for two weekends. We always do load-in on the Saturday before tech-week, then we have tech-week, a show on Friday, two shows on Saturday, a show on the following Friday, two shows on the following Saturday, then we strike. For a variety of reasons, we don't work or perform on Sundays. So, we'd need whatever we rented for 16 days, starting on a Saturday, returning it three Sundays later.



Hey, if it will save us money, we don't mind a drive, and we have trucks. What kind of prices are you getting for basic stuff?

A simple PA should run you 500/wk. 100 bucks a week per wireless channel. A 32 channel PA with a digital console should run you a grand or two a week. Source 4's can go anywhere from 5 bucks to 50 bucks a week. Depends on the shop.

Seriously, just come up with a gear list. Send it out. Let them know you are looking for a rough quote. Most will give you a ball park that you can tighten up when the show becomes more real. I have a folder of probably 500 to 1,000 quotes I have pulled from various vendors that I never filled. Its part of the job for them. Don't be a pain, but don't think you are wasting their time. They would love to have a client who hits them up for the same gear X times a year. Repeat clients are the best. They can purchase just for your gig. They can also plan on that income. That is HUGE.

 

[Stevens R. Miller]

Seriously, just come up with a gear list. Send it out. Let them know you are looking for a rough quote. Most will give you a ball park that you can tighten up when the show becomes more real.

You know, that sounds like a really good idea. If they don't want to do it, they don't have to, but I won't be misleading anyone if i tell them up front what I'm doing and why.

Thanks!

 

[EdSavoie]

Here at my school, since we do a few rentals a year to supplement what we have for specific events, we sort of go with a hybrid approach. We've generally try to buy something, and rent the rest, that way we can improve our inventory bit by bit while still keeping the cost to the individual departments low enough to keep them happy as we rarely get money for equipment directly ourselves.

 

[Morte615]

One thing to keep in mind for rentals is the maintence and repair of fixtures, especially moving/intelligent lights. If you rent, all of that is taken care of by the rental company, and if something breaks during a show they will send a replacement right away. If they are local you may even be able to get something back that day.

There are a few websites that have rates on their sites, which is a good reference, but as others have said it changes so much depending on where you are at. And 90% of the shops if you call and talk with a rep they will give you a better deal. Especially if it's something that you are going to keep going back to them for.

Something else to keep in mind with your schedule is, if you have storage space and time between shows you may want to keep some fixtures over the span of say 2 or 3 shows instead of just a single show. If you end up doing shows in quick succession it's sometime worth it to keep the fixtures instead of paying extra to have them delivered/picked up.

 

[MikeJ]

Shops will often have a Day, week, and month rate. Some just have a week. Most will only charge for days of use, so if you pick it up on Friday for a show Saturday, and return it on Monday, that is still just a 1-day rental.
Where I work a week is typically charged as 3-days, and a month is 3-weeks.
Example:
$100/day
$300/week
$900/month

Just call a shop and tell them exactly what you said in this thread. I will take them maybe 20 minutes to email you a quote, and they have a potential future client. Half of the salesperson's job is spending WAY more time on bigger shows and rentals that never come to fruition.

 

[NickVon]

With a number of Highschool Musicals I work with each year, we rent an LS9-32 and an ION with 2x20 Faderwing. we are in hte NYC/North Jersey area, and generally spend around 1000$ for a "9 day" 1 week rental . Delievery costs from 100-400$ depending on the vehical they have to transport and the amount of gear. Wireless runs about 100$ per system for that same time period. The upside for the 100$ wireless/week is it's pro gear wireless and not your cheapy consumer stuff.

 

[themuzicman]

It is true that you're only going to get quotes from most shops. Very few have itemized lists of prices on the internet. The big shops I work even try to obfuscate what they have, and if they see something requested enough times they'll just buy it and rent it to you, with you none the wiser. The biggest thing you can do to your advantage is to look around at a few rental shops, and start cultivating a relationship with them. The better the friendship becomes, the more it tends to work out in your favor. Need something for 8 days? They might just bill it as a single week as opposed to nudging it out to 2 weeks. You'll also find that the more you rent from one source repeatedly, the less you'll get nickel and dimed by them, but you have to cultivate the relationship, and make sure you're respecting their time, and not sending the gear back too messed up.

Shops will often have a Day, week, and month rate. Some just have a week.

I've found that the bigger the shop is, the less likely they are to do anything but week-long rentals.

Wireless runs about 100$ per system for that same time period. The upside for the 100$ wireless/week is it's pro gear wireless and not your cheapy consumer stuff.

This is truly the only universal aspect of pricing I have found, but it is also very NYC metro specific. $100/Channel/Week + the cost of a lav, unless you're getting a 20 channel kit or something, and then sometimes the mic will be included.

 

[TJCornish]

A very rough guide is 3% of the item's purchase price for a daily rental, 10% of the item's purchase price for a weekly rental, and 30% of the item's purchase price for a monthly rental. Some items that have a longer service life like trussing may be a little less; more fragile items like soft goods, wireless mics, and video projectors might be a little more. Repeat customers that demonstrate the ability to take care of rented equipment and who don't need 5 hours of tech support on how to use a powered speaker may get better pricing than Aunt Alice renting "a microphone" for a one-off wedding.

Different companies are better fits for different rental situations. A company that works in the theater world may have better rental packages for small theaters than the local rock n roll shop. Small companies may have better rates than larger companies, depending on the level of gear actually needed and what size rental is worth their time. If you can work with a $350 Shure PGXD system it's going to cost less than a $5000/channel Shure Axient wireless system.

There are limits to all of this though; the shop prep time and customer service are expensive parts of any rental.

TLDR - find a few companies, get multiple quotes. Try to solicit from smaller companies and build an ongoing relationship.

 

[Stevens R. Miller]

A very rough guide is 3% of the item's purchase price for a daily rental, 10% of the item's purchase price for a weekly rental, and 30% of the item's purchase price for a monthly rental. Some items that have a longer service life like trussing may be a little less; more fragile items like soft goods, wireless mics, and video projectors might be a little more. Repeat customers that demonstrate the ability to take care of rented equipment and who don't need 5 hours of tech support on how to use a powered speaker may get better pricing than Aunt Alice renting "a microphone" for a one-off wedding.

Thanks. I took Footer's advice and asked a half-dozen local vendors for non-binding estimates, telling them I wasn't planning to rent anything now, but needed the info to help make decisions down the road. Heard back from four of them already (three the same day, which is a very positive sign, imho). All have been more or less in the ranges folks here have reported, including your schedule above.

I am somewhat befuddled by the variations in expectations people report on how well maintained the gear is. In another thread, I was complaining abou the equipment we had rented for a show last year. Nearly all of the wireless microphones had loose connectors (at the mike jack on the body packs), causing us no end of problems. One just died outright. The vendor replaced that one, but billed us for the delivery cost. My view was that, if I rent a thing, the thing ought to be in good, working condition. But the old hands mostly told me that, when it comes to theater tech, you get what you get and, if it doesn't work, you deal with it. As an attorney, that strikes me as a deal I wouldn't advise my clients to enter into. I would expect a reasonable renter would include words like, "all equipment to be in good working order upon delivery" in the contract. In this thread, that seems to be more the expected practice.

As always, everyone's thoughts and advice are much appreciated. Thanks!

 

[TJCornish]

I am somewhat befuddled by the variations in expectations people report on how well maintained the gear is. In another thread, I was complaining abou the equipment we had rented for a show last year. Nearly all of the wireless microphones had loose connectors (at the mike jack on the body packs), causing us no end of problems. One just died outright. The vendor replaced that one, but billed us for the delivery cost. My view was that, if I rent a thing, the thing ought to be in good, working condition. But the old hands mostly told me that, when it comes to theater tech, you get what you get and, if it doesn't work, you deal with it. As an attorney, that strikes me as a deal I wouldn't advise my clients to enter into. I would expect a reasonable renter would include words like, "all equipment to be in good working order upon delivery" in the contract. In this thread, that seems to be more the expected practice.

As always, everyone's thoughts and advice are much appreciated. Thanks!

Those are vendors to weed out from future use.

It takes two parties to make a deal, and the free market tends to sort this kind of thing out over time. If a client is known to be hard on gear, they get the oldest, crustiest stuff. On the flip side, if a vendor doesn't maintain their gear to a functional level (accepting that some small percentage of gear failure is just life), they don't get repeat business.

My rental practice is to only rent out gear that I know works (duh), and send a spare with the rental at no charge, if at all possible. My rental agreement states that gear needs to be returned in the condition it was received excepting normal wear and tear, and that the warranty is limited to the rental price of the failed item. Depending on the circumstances I will try to accommodate my client (mostly by having working gear in the first place and providing a spare - proactively reducing the odds of having to sort out a bad situation), but charging for delivery of a replacement item in my opinion is reasonable assuming the gear wasn't a pile of garbage to begin with. The business cost of a delivery run is at least $75 for an in-town trip. If the rented item was $40, it's hard to expect very much.

For what it's worth, I have had more gear failures of equipment 0-12 months old than most of my older equipment. Infant mortality is extremely frustrating, but is reality. The good news is that the price of gear continues to fall, so it's a lot more feasible to have spares of everything than it once was.

 

[Stevens R. Miller]

My rental agreement states that gear needs to be returned in the condition it was received excepting normal wear and tear, and that the warranty is limited to the rental price of the failed item.

Excellent terms. Your lawyers served you well .

...charging for delivery of a replacement item in my opinion is reasonable assuming the gear wasn't a pile of garbage to begin with.

I had very mixed feelings about that particular charge. We had rented a couple of thousands of dollars' worth of gear, and all of their mikes had loose connections. I told the director we should have refused to accept the mikes in the first place and either demanded replacements or refunds. She's a non-confrontational sort of person, and chose instead to just ask me to cope as best I could. But, when one mike just died outright, we had no choice but to ask for a replacement. Given that we had rented so much other stuff and it wasn't our fault the mike died, I expected the company to bring us the replacement for free, but they didn't. As you say, market forces do come into play. Speaking for myself, I won't be renting from those folks if it's ever up to me.

BTW, the joke was sort of on them, in the end. Since those mikes all had loose connections when they arrived (causing horrible "banging" noises when the actors moved around), I felt no reluctance about using wads of gaffer's tape to pull the headset wires down one side of the body packs and hold the connections steady by pulling the loose plugs sideways. If those jacks had been snug in the first place, my treatment of them would probably have resulted in them being as loose as they already were. But, since they were already messed up, a "solution" that I would ordinarily chew out a junior tech for using seemed about right. Certainly, the gear was returned in no worse shape than when we got it.

 

[soundlight]

The rule at a rental house I used to work at was - if we delivered the gear to you originally and a piece of gear failed and there were no spares, we would generally deliver a replacement free of charge. If you picked the gear up, you had to come pick up your replacement (or pay us to deliver).

 

[Stevens R. Miller]

The rule at a rental house I used to work at was - if we delivered the gear to you originally and a piece of gear failed and there were no spares, we would generally deliver a replacement free of charge. If you picked the gear up, you had to come pick up your replacement (or pay us to deliver).

That seems fair enough. The particular experience I had was complicated by the fact that the rental firm required a sign-off when they delivered the equipment, which meant we had a chance to inspect and accept or reject it before taking possession of it. Suffice to say that the inspection was, imho, not adequate, but we accepted it anyway. Grousing after the fact that some things weren't in good enough condition is hard to do in that context (which is also fair enough).

I'm kind of amazed that so many rental firms are out there, renting at the rates they do, as there are. As far as I know, most, if not all, of them require no evidence at all that the person using their equipment knows what he or she is doing. Given how easy it is to blow the zap in anything electronic, I would have expected some training or certification requirement. But I have never seen anything of the kind. Given that, it is kind of surprising to me that most of the rented stuff I've seen is in as good condition as it is.

 

[themuzicman]

I had very mixed feelings about that particular charge. We had rented a couple of thousands of dollars' worth of gear, and all of their mikes had loose connections.

It's for this exact reason that most of the larger rental shops refuse to rent lavs and instead include them as purchased perishables. If the connectors aren't shorting out, the mics will get sweated out eventually. Even when I design shows in regional theaters, without the support I get from the dedicated theater rental shops, I impress upon the theaters that out of all the gear to own, if nothing else own the lavs. If I find myself repairing connectors in tech because the rental shop gave me bum mics, and the theater didn't listen to my advice to purchase, I bill the theater for parts + labor and tell them to pay me and try to deduct it from rental bill - the more low-end rental houses will see a bad connector and just bill the full purchase price of a new mic to the last place that rented it.

The vendor replaced that one, but billed us for the delivery cost. My view was that, if I rent a thing, the thing ought to be in good, working condition. But the old hands mostly told me that, when it comes to theater tech, you get what you get and, if it doesn't work, you deal with it. As an attorney, that strikes me as a deal I wouldn't advise my clients to enter into. I would expect a reasonable renter would include words like, "all equipment to be in good working order upon delivery" in the contract.

Yea, that's pretty dirty of the rental company to do that. The way I work with all the shops I have established relationships with is that if something is broken in the first week or so of my having it and I let them know it came from the shop broken, they usually truck it to me for free at their convenience. If I break something, or need more things, or need a broken thing replaced now then the trucking bill is on me. That being said, I also go to the rental shops and test all the gear before I rent anything - it's a luxury the theater specific shops provide in New York. As far as "you get what you get" -- no reputable shop works like that because they know what it does to their reputation. Even the tiniest rock/corporate rental shops I worked at powered every piece of gear on and at least slammed sound through it just to make sure it at least sounded decent, it made the rental a little more expensive than our competitors, but it meant we had fewer service calls (the better shops ran a full battery of tests using industrial audio analyzers to make sure the gear was performing to manufacturer spec). Heck, I reject gear back to the shop if I get it and it fails the shake test, even if it works just fine. Things do happen, but I want to mitigate as much risk as possible in the shows I do.

I'm kind of amazed that so many rental firms are out there, renting at the rates they do, as there are. As far as I know, most, if not all, of them require no evidence at all that the person using their equipment knows what he or she is doing. Given how easy it is to blow the zap in anything electronic, I would have expected some training or certification requirement.

Most standard rental agreements I've gotten usually want you to take out insurance on the gear, the shops typically also have their own insurance on the gear. Granted, I've blown up/broken a fair bit of rental gear and usually the shops can patch it up, and if they can't they just send it back to the manufacturer. As for training/certs, there aren't too many of those around for specific pieces of gear.