Speaker Hire for a Coogee Beach Wedding: Ceremony, Canapes and Reception on One Booking

Coogee is one of our busiest delivery runs, and a wedding there is almost never one event. It is three. A ceremony somewhere with a view and no power point, canapes on the grass while the photographer works, and a reception in a room built for surf club raffles rather than speeches. Here is how a Coogee wedding of that shape gets covered: 110 guests, three spaces inside a two hundred metre walk, one delivery from our Waverley warehouse, and the reasoning behind every piece of gear that went in the van.

The brief in one paragraph

Ceremony at 3pm on the headland with no power anywhere near it, a celebrant, a friend reading a poem, and a playlist off a phone for the walk down the aisle. Canapes from half three on the grass. Reception from 5pm in a surf club function room: forty minutes of speeches, then a DJ until 11pm. The couple had already been quoted by a company that wanted to send two systems and two crews. They did not need either, and neither do most people.

The whole day ran on one van, one bump-in and one pack down. The way you get there is by hiring gear that can do two jobs well, rather than four pieces of gear that each do one job perfectly. Every choice below comes back to that.

The ceremony: no power, plenty of wind

Grant Reserve and Dunningham Reserve have no public power. None. Every Coogee headland ceremony we supply runs on battery, which sounds like a compromise until you have heard a modern battery powered speaker do it. The pick here was our 2 x Bose S1 Pro+ battery powered speakers package, which arrives with stands and a wireless microphone already in it. Two speakers rather than one, because 110 people standing in a wide arc on a headland are not all in front of a single box. Two on stands at the ends of the arc means the back row hears the vows at the same volume as the front row, and nobody has a speaker pointed at their ear for twenty minutes.

Wind is the thing people underestimate at Coogee. It comes off the water and straight across the reserve, and it does two things: it strips the top off the sound as it travels, and it batters the microphone capsule so every consonant turns into a thump. The fix is not more volume. The fix is getting the microphone closer to the mouth and the speakers closer to the guests. An Audio Technica wireless lapel microphone on the celebrant picked her voice up from fifteen centimetres away instead of across a lectern, and a single wireless handheld microphone sat in a bag for the reading and the vows. Both ran into the same speaker package, so there was nothing extra to power and nothing extra to fail.

Our rule for any ceremony with no power and more than about thirty guests: you are hiring two things, a battery speaker and a wireless microphone. Not one. A speaker with a playlist and no microphone means the guests at the back watch a mime. A microphone with one small speaker means the guests at the back hear a mime badly. Hire the pair.

Canapes: the hour nobody plans for

Between the ceremony and the reception there is usually an hour where nothing is officially happening and everyone is standing around with a drink. Couples forget it, and it is the easiest hour of the day to improve. One Bose S1 Pro+ battery powered speaker came off its stand and went down onto the grass near the bar, still on battery, still paired to the same phone. That is the whole trick. One speaker, thirty seconds of work, and the gap between the two halves of the day stops feeling like a gap.

This is where hiring two battery speakers pays for itself twice. During the ceremony they are a stereo pair. During canapes one becomes the background music while the other is already being walked up to the reception room. Hire a single big speaker and you cannot split it, so somebody ends up playing music out of a phone on a table. Our full range of battery powered speakers and gear exists for exactly this kind of day, where the power point is the one thing the venue cannot offer.

The reception room: long, hard and echoey

Surf club function rooms are wonderful for the view and cruel for sound. Hard floors, hard walls, big windows, a long thin shape and a ceiling lower than you would like. Sound bounces around a room like that for a long time, and the more you turn it up the worse it gets, because you are adding to the echo as much as the volume. Speeches are where this bites. Half the room hears the toast and the other half hears mush.

For 110 guests in a room like that, the call was a QSC K12.2 and KSub setup. Two K12.2 speakers on stands in the front corners, angled in and down towards the guests rather than firing flat down the length of the room at the back wall. That angle is the single biggest improvement available in a hard room and it costs nothing. The QSC KSub sat on the floor by the DJ booth and did almost nothing during the speeches, then carried the bottom end all night once the DJ started. Same rig, two completely different jobs, no changeover in between.

The wireless handheld from the ceremony came inside and did the speeches. Nothing new to hire, nothing new to learn, and the best man had already watched it work at three o'clock.

What actually went in the van

• 2 x Bose S1 Pro+ on stands with a wireless microphone for the headland ceremony, running entirely on battery.
• A wireless lapel microphone for the celebrant, so the wind lost the argument.
• A wireless handheld microphone for the reading, the vows and later the speeches.
• 2 x QSC K12.2 speakers on stands plus a KSub for the reception room and the DJ set.
• A bag of four Wedge Tri battery powered up lights with a remote, spaced along the long wall to take the function room off its fluorescent look. No cables across the floor, no gaffer tape, no argument with the venue.
• Spare cables and a spare microphone battery, because we are ten minutes away and would still rather not drive back.

What we would change next time

Two things. The first is timing. The gear landed at 1pm and the wedding party wanted the reserve looking empty in photos until quarter to three, so the stands sat in the sun for an hour and a half. Better to deliver the reception gear early and bring the ceremony gear on a second run at half two. It is a ten minute drive from Waverley. There is no reason to compromise the photos for it.

The second is the sub. It sat behind the DJ booth because that is where the power was, which meant the bass was strongest exactly where the DJ was standing and weakest out on the dance floor. Moving it two metres forward would have cost nothing at all. Small stuff, but the difference between a good night and a fine one is usually made of small stuff.

If you are planning something similar

Most Coogee weddings are a version of this one, and most are simpler than the couple fears. If you want the specifics for your own booking, our speaker and PA hire page for Coogee has the delivery detail, the local venue notes and the packages we send most often. We run the same thing along the beaches, so there are equivalents for speaker hire in Bronte and speaker hire in Randwick. If the DJ is the bigger question, DJ equipment hire in Coogee covers decks, controllers and booths.

Or just call and describe the day. Three spaces and a headland with no power is not an unusual brief in this part of Sydney. It is a Saturday.