Mixing console
lastmod 2025-09-18created 2025-09-182 edits
An audio mixer is an electronic device that mixes audio signals. It goes by several names: mixing console, mixing desk, and sound board. Audio mixers are used in many settings, such as recording studios, broadcast rooms, broadcast & film post-production, and public address systems (PA System).
An audio mixer can control the loudness and timbre of sound, as well as phase and the surround image. Audio mixers can be broadly divided by how they process signals into analog mixers, digital, and so on, and the signals modified through mixing (voltages or digital samples) can be seen as a single combined signal. In other words, mixing the individual signals produces an entirely different signal, which people perceive as a combined sound.
To take the most basic use of an audio mixer as an example: the channels of each sound source played through speakers are, before mixing, effectively independent as signals, but the speaker channels the listener ultimately hears are limited to 1 channel for mono and 2 channels for stereo. For that reason, the producer needs to mix the many channels so that the listener can finally hear them, and this can be called the basic purpose of an audio mixer. To put it more simply, if a production needs 8 microphone channels, the consumer would need 8 speakers to hear all of those channels. However, a typical stereo system uses only two speakers. Since it is not the listener who mixes those signals, they need to be mixed in the final mastering process.