It can sometimes shock me and not just clients the cost of a high quality disco rig. The rig about is one of our wedding setups and will tip the scales at over £5000 without adding any bags or boxes for transport.
Starting with the framework we use the equinox truss booth dressed in the quad colour starcloth and if you want white, there is a lycra scrim over it. We add to this a shelf for the moving heads. Then we have two truss podiums again with white scrim covers. This gives me enough places to position the main lighting, hold my controller, laptop and playout and also hide the bags and wires. Your looking at around £1000 for this part of the rig.
Moving onto the sound this rig is using a mini line array DB ES 802 which is good for up to around 100 people and a decent sized room. The cabling is all high quality van damme xlrs and in this instance were running an American Audio BT Media player as the mixer and backup, a Kam 1960 radio mic, a Denon MC4000 controller and of course one of our laptops. Audio wise your probably looking at around £2000
The main lighting is provided by a pair of Chauvet Intimidator 255irc moving heads with custom wireless conversion and 4 of the gobos swapped for high quality projected image gobos. This is a large chunk of the lighting budget but they are soo good. For wash we use both a set of Equinox Pix Battens and Stairville Par Cans in the podiums. The effect lights used this time are Kam Stratospheres and as with the moving heads all of the lights have been converted to wireless. The spend on the lighting matches that of the audio at around £2000.
If you want to add in bags, power cables, power distribution and the other sundries like rechargeable batteries you can throw another £500-600 at the price. It doesn't look much but the price of quality impacts the final amount and i've not even mentioned that we have the majority of this as back up in the van. So when your thinking about our price, remember what your getting just as equipment alone.
Andy P