Speaker Wiring

There are two types of wiring used with speakers in my situation, balanced and unbalanced. Balanced wiring basically can travel long distances without being affected by electrical noise, meaning disturbances. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_audio It's very interesting to know about these two types of wiring because it might come up in Trivial Pursuit or in a party conversation. What I did was buy a SM Pro Audio DI8 mixer. It basically takes your unbalanced audio and outputs it as balanced. Also, it can mix all your eight channels to a stereo output. There are volume controls on all the channels as well as the stereo mix, very cool. I paid $154 but the list was quite a bit more than that. So, all my audio goes into my own 3->1 mixer which has 8 channels. It is actually 8 individual mixers in one box, each with 3 ins and 1 out with volume on each channel and on the output. From there, the eight outs go into the DI8. Then, I use my balanced wiring to go to my amps and then to my speakers. I have one pair of speakers where I use a return signal feature. These are my base and drums speakers. These have a base bin and a higher range speaker on a stand. So, the signal comes back out of the base bin and into a smaller amp and then to the smaller speakers. I also have an extra output on two mixers in my eight mixer box. I use these for my lead vocal and my harmony vocal tracks. I need to join those together into a new channel and send that new channel feed to a base speaker I use for all my vocals. Base is very non-directional so it will just give all my vocals that deeper sound. I talk about this on my website http://www.black-box-band.com/ if you would like to read more.