My old Behringer Xenix mixer finally gave out. I had been using the old mixer with an external USB DAC to connect with my laptop. So, when I went looking for a replacement, I thought it might be nice if I found a mixer with a built-in USB interface. the ART PDB4 did the job!

The audio quality is somewhat better than what you might find from the DAC in your average laptop. However, it's not great. Also, there's no tone control on the computer input channel, so you can control the EQ from the mixer. The first two channels do have two-band EQ, which is about as minimal as you can get, but good enough for my purposes. The bad news is that he preamps are low powered. I needed to crank both the input and channel gain almost all the way to max to get a good mic level into the computer. The good news is they aren't very noisy when turned up like a lot of cheap mixers.

This little guy has a lot of functionality in a small, inexpensive package. If you're looking to record your vocals and guitar or keyboard, this thing should do the trick.

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