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Rentals, Event Production, Sales, Installation, Design, Acoustics, Service and Repair!
JK Sound is a complete Pro Audio provider, offering a synergy of services that combine to address all the needs of any event, installation, or design requirement. Our dedicated staff of 20 talented audio professionals works as a team to meet the needs of our clients.
A San Francisco Institution
JK Sound is tightly woven into the San Francisco community. Having provided systems for thousands of local events over the past 25 years, from the earliest years of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, to the LGBT Pride Celebration, to Love Parade, to Carnival, Cinco De Mayo, and Bernal Heights fairs, to Burning Man Camps, to 25 consecutive Folsom Street Fairs, JK Sound has supported community and neighborhood groups with high quality, professional sound systems that were designed for the demands of pro concert touring.
Pro AV for Your Important Meeting
While we are proud of our community cred, our bread and butter derives from our ethic of “failure is not an option.” When an important Regents or company meeting is taking place, the production must be transparent, as if we were not even there. But we are, at hundreds of corporate meetings a year, with back up equipment and a yes sir no mam can do attitude.
A Fail Safe System for Service Delivery
In our rental department, under the direction of Kevin Bushman, we have developed a focused, organized production service delivery system and have become very successful in delivering what is needed, when it is needed, without fail. After all, live sound production is a one shot deal.
Scope of the Job
Last summer we provided 14 small sound systems to the Nike Marathon, while also covering three stages of concert sound for the Exotic Erotic Ball at the Cow Palace, plus several other smaller events without any mishaps, all in a days work. We’re ready for anything.
Award Winning Custom Systems
We are also well known for installing the most sophisticated of sound systems, always using the best available technology and getting audibly superior results. Recent installations include the system at Ruby Skye, which won at the Winter Music Conference’s Club World Awards in the category of Best Sound System.
Leading the Way
JK Sound was the first to install a BSS Omnidrive in a night club, the first to use a Dolby Lake processor to tune a dance music system, the first to modify EAW speakers to handle even more power. Our EAW KF730 line array installation at Mezzanine is the first of its kind in the Bay Area and has made the club the destination for bands that are serious about the quality of their audio production.
No Job too Small
While we are proud of our grand accomplishments, we make our everyday living handling installations and events like your wedding or restaurant sound system installation. Each job goes through the same process that produces the same rigorous attention to detail as do our most grueling 3 day music festivals or our top flight club systems installations.
Still reading? OK, you deserve the truth
JK Sound: From the Beginning.
JK Sound was born out of the Hixon Lacina Band; a bunch of musicians, with way too much equipment. In fact, we had so much equipment we nick-named our band “The Victims of Technology” because of the interminable amount of time it took us to set up our PA. We always sounded great but left our audiences of college kids scratching their heads and saying, “That was weird, man.” Van tours up and down the west coast were getting old fast. After all, we wrote and arranged all our own music, built our own sound system and had to set it up and tear it down before and after every show. (Why do things the easy way when there is a perfectly hard way to do it?) And the girls had all gone home alone by the time we had finished loading the truck. So it was pretty easy to contemplate a change of careers. Heck, we were already trained roadies, so why not do sound for people who could actually play? It was the early 80’s and John Meyer of Meyer Sound Labs was revolutionizing the audio industry across the Bay in Berkeley. We hooked up with a guy who had been a roadie for the Grateful Dead, had a solid electronics background and an inside connection to John Meyer. The guy rented a small corner of our warehouse where he repaired guitar amps, designed electrical circuits, and smoked large quantities of pot. He then helped us buy a couple of pallets of old components from the Dead’s “Wall of Sound” and we went about building our own custom 4 way quad amped system. Before we knew it the system had grown to 16 stacks of double 18” subs, double 12” mid bass, 8 two inch horns and 8 one inch horns. Like the original Wall of Sound, it took about a day to set up, but it sounded sweet when it was working right. The repair guy ended up moving out of our warehouse and into Meyer’s Sound Lab, taking with him the design for the CP12 parametric EQ which became one of Meyer’s big sellers. But we hustled forward, managing to build 10 rehearsal studios in our warehouse, as well as, a 16 track recording studio. It was 1984. Our band was still rehearsing almost every night. We were running three businesses: the recording studio, the rehearsal business, and the sound company, as well as, recording and writing our own music and producing our own shows. Something had to give, and it was us. The band broke up, we turned the recording studio into a deluxe rehearsal studio with a recording booth and we began concentrating on the sound company. Suddenly, instead trying to be a jack of all trades, we were forced to become a master of one. Michael Lacina, the band’s keyboard player became the company president and thus the modern JK Sound came to into being.