He noticed that parkgoers were mostly setting up store-bought speakers, and he pondered ways to deliver more full-bodied sound that could be powered portably. Through research and tinkering Scholz found that lithium iron phosphate batteries, the kind used for utility power in motor homes, could drive his public address speakers efficiently for hours.

The speakers’ look required less trial and error than finding the batteries. “I basically just woke up one day and I knew I had to make it pink,” he said. “It’s a color that’s always captivated me.” He painted the speakers’ grilles and invested in as many pink connector cables, accessories and decorations as he could find.

By 2021, Scholz had 14 speakers, a van and a monthly party called Sweet Kicks, in the schoolyard where he and the D.J.s Miss Alicia and Rose Kourts had run their initial battery tests. But Scholz remained unsatisfied. “I felt almost as if I shouldn’t play on my own sound system and that it should be used to support other people, that I should use it responsibly,” he said.

So he offered his setup to his roller skater friends, many of whom were still using a single Bluetooth speaker in public parks; and then to St. James Joy, whose resident D.J.s had visited one of the Sweet Kicks parties. Within months, Scholz said, “the phone started ringing. And we were doing three, sometimes five events a week.”

For these bigger and more ambitious gigs, Scholz sourced and built additional speakers at a lower cost and higher quality than pre-manufactured. He bought a 16-foot truck with a lift gate and began hiring crews — mostly women of color — to set up and tear down at the sites. This summer, he is at 42 speakers, nearly all of which were deployed at St. James Joy.