my romantic view of analogue mixing was quickly rectified when we bought a desk. we have an A&H pa12, and i did some mixing tests. if anything it caused more trouble than not. getting down and dirty with parametric EQs can be a tough task, especially when trying to squeeze in a lot of sound. plus your dedicating yourself to a mixdown... that cant be changed at a later stage.

running stuff in hot can add alot of noise to the mix too. the one thing i did seem to like was for top end kicks.. the overdrive can sound nice, and sometimes the noise added is desirable. instead of a desk.. maybe a distortion unit or tube compressor or something might be more your cup of tea?

as steve said, PSP stuff is really nice. the PSPmixpack2 can really warm up stuff if you use group tracks. saturate the low elements together, mid elements together... etc