Mixing Boards
To be honest, you can record fine without involving a mixing board in your home studio… I did it for years
BUT…
If you're currently recording on your computer at home without an external mixing board then the biggest move you can make is to integrate a mixing board into your set up. The difference in sound will knock your socks off! Something about taking your recorded audio outside through an exterior mixer that adds another depth to it that's really quite noticeable.
Even if you're using a high end recording program like Pro Tools and you've been mixing on it's virtual mixing window with all sorts of plug-ins, you've got to take the next step and route it all through an exterior mixing board… it's like someone just let it out of a box.
Like most other pieces of gear these days you can get in for under a few hundred dollars and go up into the 1000's with several choices like analog or digital mixers, number of channels, mono and stereo, number of submixes, onboard effects, powered, studio or live etc.
You can get a good little mixer that'll do the job for under $200. Behringer makes some very good products for the home studio market which is not always really high end but everybody knows you get what you pay for. As we set up our home studio we soon realize we can't spend high end dollars for every piece of gear we need or else we'd never get the set-up going.
Some folks bash some Behringer products but thanks to them, many of us can get decent working gear at a very affordable price… so we can get to work!
An even better known name is Yamaha which makes some very high end mixing boards but they have now entered that bottom end market to… hey, it's a large market!
Also in the $150 price range is the Yamaha MG82CX. I do own a Behringer but would bet that the Yamaha would be a cleaner board just because of the name… I could be wrong.
