Excuse my ignorance in asking this--it's out of my own curiosity. I've noticed that on mixers there a few unbalanced inputs and many balanced inputs. If one has many sources with unbalanced outputs, what is the best way to connect them to a mixer?
If the mixer has unbalanced inputs and stated above, you just connect to those inputs. The mixer has the electronics to handle the signal. No reason to put more electronics in front of the mixers circuits.