Digital desks

[picato]

My personal opinion: Digital desks are really good, but not the cheap ones for home recording purposes... I suggest putting that money on a decent audiocard with lots of ins and outs instead. If you also got a really good computer and some nice plugins you don't need the eq and effects on the desks either, and you get much better audio quality. But it's really nice with hands on experience though. a mixing desk is nicer to work with. Some years ago digital mixing desks served an important purpose: they handled a bit of the effects that regular computers then didn't have the power to do.
So my opinion is that with the computers of today, you don't really need a digital mixing desk. I would have spend that money on the computer and software instead. If you search for the hands on experience you could also get a midi controller desk to mix with your sequencer program, if you use one of course.