About Alquiaudio: event sound in Catalonia since 2015

Alquiaudio was born in 2015, when Sindy decided to buy her first sound system after six years working with town-festival bands.

Sindy started in 2009 as a set-up assistant for a band from the Vallès. Within a few seasons she was running the monitor desk and travelling to more than forty town festivals across Catalonia every summer. That is where she saw a gap: associations, families and small businesses that needed professional sound for a single event but couldn’t pay for a full band production.

The first system was two speakers, a small desk and two mics. Today it is a 6,000 W active system with two 18″ subwoofers, six Electro-Voice speakers, 2×15″ columns and a 32-channel desk. You can see every item in the Alquiaudio equipment inventory.

I started out loading speakers. That’s why I know how much each one weighs and why you have to arrive early.

— Sindy, founder and technical lead

It is the one-page document that comes with every Alquiaudio quote, covering the placement plan, power requirements, timings and microphones for the event.

We created it because most problems at events aren’t technical, they are about communication: the venue didn’t know what time we were arriving, the caterer took the socket or nobody said the speech had been brought forward. With the Rider, everyone has the same information before the day.

1. Placement planWhere each speaker, the desk and the technician go.
2. PowerSockets needed and on which circuits.
3. TimingsArrival, sound check, start and take-down.
4. Moments and micsWho speaks, when and with which mic.
5. Plan BCovered alternative and back-up equipment.

That placement matters more than power, that you always need a Plan B and that the technician has to stay until the end.

The Penedès storm (2019)

At a wedding at a masia in the Penedès, at 6:40 pm, a storm forced the ceremony into the barn. We moved the sound in 35 minutes and the ceremony started just a quarter of an hour late. Since then every van carries covers and a compact back-up system.

The shared socket at a town festival

At an open-air dance, the sound shared a circuit with a bar and the breaker tripped every time the griddle came on. Since then the Rider specifies two independent circuits and we check them on arrival.

We don’t sub-hire equipment, we don’t publish fixed price lists and we don’t take on events beyond what our system can cover reliably.

We prefer to be upfront: if your event is a festival for several thousand people, we are not the right company and we will say so in the first message. What we do is give our very best to events of up to about 500 people, which are the vast majority of weddings, parties, corporate events and town festivals in Catalonia.