Today there is a lot of great gear on the market so it's not very hard to get good sound. But getting GREAT sound and doing it consistantly at a lot of differrent venues is a different thing. At Stage Directions we've spent lots of money on our sound gear. First of all our serious systems large and small all come from Apogee Sound. This stuff sounds great but is expensive. We know you won't pay more to rent a system just because of a label but we've packaged our racks with Apogee processors and amps as well. We've built the support gear, consoles and cases into packages that are quick to set up. Now we know that there are lots of opinions in the audio field about brands, but we think that audio is about using your ears and liking what you hear and this stuff just sounds great. Now the other side of it is knowing what you're doing and how to apply great gear to a room. Well we've been doing it for over 18 years now so that should address that.