I went to a concert last weekend. As concerts go, it was a pretty small venue. Yet there was a massive mixing board in use. I’m going to talk about a mixing board, but certainly nothing that complicated. For fourteen years I have been teaching CorelDRAW Unleashed Boot Camps and I hadn’t used a microphone. By the end of the third day, my voice would get a little bit scratchy.

Two months ago I decided to solve the problem by getting the Behringer 802 8-Input Mixer. It allows me to plug in a nice condenser microphone that I’ve had for years. It also allows me to plug in the sound from the laptop I use for teaching. I can adjust the two inputs however I like and then send the mixed audio signal to an amplifier. All of this for under $60 and it is very small if portability is important. Behringer makes much bigger mixers and they make some that are even smaller. I found this one to have the right features at a great price. Check it out!