Depending on what sound you are going for there is a certain style of analog warmth you can give sounds by overloading the mixer intentionally... Best way to know if that's something you want is to try it out ;)
And yes.. you will need a nice mixer for it to sound good.
I believe Prodigy derived a lot of their sound from that style of overloading on a Mackie 8Bus mixer.

If you know what you are doing you can achieve the same sound via plugins.