True Sound Hire

True Sound Hire is a Guildford-based sound, lighting and event production firm that rents out kit and, when you want it, turns up to install and run it. The company also trades as The Sound and Light Hire Company, and it works a radius covering Surrey, Hampshire and London, sitting roughly half an hour from the south west and south east edges of the capital. The split between dry hire and full-service delivery is the first thing worth understanding about True Sound Hire, because it shapes who this is for.

Dry hire versus full production service

You can take the gear and handle it yourself, or hand the whole technical side over and let their crew do site visits, setup and the run. Running both properly takes a bigger stock holding and a deeper bench of people, so the dual offer is itself a reasonable indicator of the scale of the operation.

Sound lighting and AV inventory

The catalogue at True Sound Hire is wide, reading like the inventory of an operator that has been asked for most things at least once. On the sound side there are PA speakers, DJ equipment, radio microphones and live sound systems. Lighting runs from disco lighting and LED uplighters through to laser effects and full stage rigs. The AV column is where smaller hire firms often fall short, but True Sound Hire lists projectors, LED and plasma screens, lecterns and conference PA, pointing at corporate and presentation work as much as parties.

Lecterns and conference PA are dull, unglamorous items to keep in stock, and a firm that holds them tends to get booked for meetings and product launches as readily as for the showier weekend jobs. Staging covers outdoor festival platforms, truss systems and indoor decks. Then there is the decorative tier: LED dance floors, LED furniture, backdrops and drapes, the sort of finishing touches added once the technical side is sorted. Holding that range under one roof lets True Sound Hire pitch for a full production, since a client booking a wedding can take the staging, the sound, the lighting and the dance floor from a single source.

Events matched to equipment range

Set against the kit list, the spread of events makes sense. Weddings, corporate functions, house parties, festivals, conferences, school productions and outdoor cinema all appear, each leaning on a different corner of the inventory. A school production booking True Sound Hire needs staging and a reliable PA more than it needs laser effects; an outdoor cinema needs a screen and clean sound; a festival needs heavy staging and live sound systems. The breadth is matched by stock that can actually serve it, which is not always true of firms that advertise everything and own a fraction of it. A quick search in any business directory for regional AV hire turns up names that look comparable on a list page but carry nothing like this range in their warehouse.

Are the brand claims credible?

Two claims on the site deserve a closer look, because they are the kind of thing that can either anchor credibility or undercut it. The first is a roster of brands True Sound Hire says it has supplied: Adidas, Amazon, Nike, Mercedes and Spotify. That is a heavy list for a regional hire operation, and there is no way to test it from the outside.

It is plausible that big brands running an event in or near London would source local AV and staging, and that True Sound Hire handled some of that. London-based activations frequently pull in a nearby supplier for the physical kit while keeping the creative work in-house, so a Surrey firm appearing on a roster like this is not far-fetched. It is equally true that "supplied" can mean a single screen for one activation, so the names tell you the company has touched corporate work at that level without indicating how deep the relationship went.

The second claim is sharper: ranked number one out of 369 UK sound equipment hire companies in its region. The specificity of 369 is oddly precise for a figure with no stated source, and "number one" rankings in hire are rarely independent. It is the sort of line that sounds authoritative and proves very little. The marketing leans harder than the verifiable facts support, and a careful reader should treat the brand names and the ranking as ambition rather than evidence. The substance is solid, but the loudest claims are also the softest under scrutiny.

Customer reviews across platforms

Where the picture firms up is in the outside feedback. On Trustpilot True Sound Hire holds a four-star rating across 24 reviews, a modest volume but a respectable score. Yell.com carries positive entries with several five-star mentions, and Nicelocal rates it a full five out of five. ReviewCentre has qualitative praise too, though without a clear aggregate number. None of these are large sample sizes, so the rating sits in the encouraging-but-not-overwhelming range. Twenty-four Trustpilot reviews at four stars is the kind of footprint you would expect from a busy regional firm that has not gone out of its way to farm reviews, and the consistency across four platforms is more reassuring than any single perfect score.

Contact details and opening hours

Reaching True Sound Hire is straightforward. A freephone 0800 number, an email address and the Guildford location are all listed in an obvious spot. The hours are unusually specific: Monday to Saturday nine until seven, Thursday until nine at night, plus a short Sunday window in the early afternoon. That late Thursday slot and the Saturday cover point to a firm that knows its customers plan events around their own working week. For event work, where a question about power or dimensions can derail a plan, reaching True Sound Hire on a Saturday or Thursday evening is a practical benefit.

So the strengths are concrete. Deep and varied stock, a clear dual model of dry hire versus full production, sensible event coverage, and a spread of modest but consistent third-party ratings. True Sound Hire comes across as an established operator rather than a one-van outfit, and for an event in Surrey, Hampshire or the London fringe it is a reasonable name to get a quote from. The full-service option, with site visits and a crew handling setup, is the part most worth paying for if an event has any complexity. A wedding party that cannot get a borrowed speaker working at seven in the evening is a different problem from one where the supplier's own technician is on site. True Sound Hire at least makes both routes available, which is more than many local competitors manage.

The doubt that lingers is the gap between what True Sound Hire claims about itself and what can be checked. The brand names and the number-one ranking are the loudest parts of the pitch, yet they are exactly the parts a customer cannot verify. The genuinely useful proof, the 24 reviews and the cross-platform scores, is comparatively quiet. A four-star average across two dozen reviews is fine, but it does not match the dominance the headline ranking implies, and for a high-stakes booking like a wedding or a festival, two dozen data points is a modest cushion. Whether the polished self-description matches the experience on the day is the one thing the listing cannot settle.