Does the mixer have enough microphone, line, and instrument inputs to cover your expected needs with a few in reserve? Does the mixer offer enough auxiliary outputs, in addition to the main stereo pair, to feed your monitors or headphone amp if you’re sending more than one mix to guests and performers?
Will it be in a studio setting, such as for music or podcast production? Or will you be mixing and possibly recording live performances? Or perhaps you’re hoping to do it all. What to consider when shopping for a digital mixerĪsk yourself what you’re mainly going to use your mixer for. Mixing user impressions and first-hand experience, we summed our research and selected five digital mixers that deliver in the price-for-performance category. And while some of the mixers we chose also offer onboard recording, we looked at that as a bonus rather than a requirement. The hardware also had to function as both a mixer and an audio interface, making it usable both for studio and stage. We chose products that ranged from a little more than $200 to just over $1000. When choosing the digital mixers for this roundup, we applied a specific set of criteria.
They can connect to your computer and serve as audio interfaces, letting you send audio back and forth between the mixer and your digital audio workstation, or DAW. They give you powerful convenience features you can’t get on an old-school mixing board, such as saving and recalling settings and control via remote app.
They can process instruments and voices with a range of built-in effects that would require a rack full of gear in the analog domain. They tend to be more compact and thus easier to transport. Digital mixers offer several intriguing advantages over their analog counterparts.