Kinda.
Forgive me if I'm patronising you, but most people who think they need a mixer, don't.
If there's going to be live use then fair enough, but if it's just studio recording I'd urge you to look at plain multichannel interfaces instead.
Presonus FP10 and
Tascam us1800 are two examples.
It looks like the tascam is in your price range too!
The mixing is generally done in the computer now, so there's no real need for hands on faders etc.
The big pro studios often use consoles but the sheer quality of each module is a big part of the reason for that.
Also, they may be tracking to tape, or patching in various pieces of hardware etc.
That part you didn't understand;
Often these
mixers do exactly that. They mix several signals into a stereo output.
That means your 8 microphones or whatever are already committed to stereo by the time the hit the computer.
That, of course, means you can't tweak the kick or snare, or whatever anymore.
Everything would have to be pretty much perfect at the tracking stage, which is a great thing to learn, but why would you want to limit yourself that way?
Granted, some of them do keep your tracks separate and are effectively multichannel interfaces with faders and eqs etc, but even then I don't really see the point.
I don't know that exact model, but behringer have many mixers with this stereo limitation.
