You can afford a PA System

We host an evening program at Church called Bible Hour. This is a combination of praise, drama, and puppets. This program is hosted in a large room. This is not a modern large auditoium or drama area, but rather a large classroom. A few years ago we needed to upgrade our PA system. We wanted to be able to handle microphones as well as music (in stereo). At the time PA systems were about $250. Speakers were extra. The entire budget for this program annually is only $500. We decided to be invetive and and use a prepackaged stereo with surround sound speakers. Today you can get these for around $100 at Walmart or Target. Just be sure the system has the capability for an external audio input. That would be the red and white RCA type jacks. I purchased my son a system like this for about $70 for Christmas. The nice thing about some of these new cheap systems is that you can use them to play CD and DVD directly. It's all included in that price for the surround sound DVD player. Depending on the size of room you have you can upgrade the system to a higher powered system for a while before you have to consider buying a real PA system.

With the external input you can attach a mixer. The mixer will allow you to connect microphones, a CD player and MP3 player, a DVD or just about anything else you have that produces audio. Just pump it all through the stereo. The mixer you can get for under $100. I like the Behringer brand for being good quality and low price. At the time we did this we used a brand called Mackie. It was a few hundred dollars and great quality. If we did it over again we'd have gone with the cheaper version. It just wasn't avaiable a few years ago.

We were able to capitalize on microphones when our worship team upgraded. We were able to get four wireless microphones for nothing. You can also use wired microphone. They can be as cheap as $100. I know it doesn't sound cheap. In reality, for our group we can get by with one wired microphone for introductions and narration. The group isn't so large that we mic all of our actors or even the leader (but his voice does carry).