I had a Presonus Monitor Station V2 that I had modded by Revive Audio. New op amps and caps in the audio path as well as the power supply. I didn't have any complaints until the volume knob and the aux selector switch (as well as the headphone selector switches) started being scratchy and unreliable. De-oxit didn't seem to get in there, and after opening it up to try and deoxit the pots and switches, I somehow broke it. Anyways, long story short, I realized that the knobs and switches were crap anyways.

The Nero is the opposite in that regard-- the main volume knob as well as the smaller knobs are very solid and have no wiggle. Time will tell if they perform well for years, but they feel to be of high quality. The volume really does track accurately to both channels throughout it's range (as Audient claims). The selector buttons are also very nice, and remind me of the classic square light up buttons on SSL consoles, Otari tape machines, etc. You can hear the relays clicking as you select different speakers/sources. Nothing clicks or pops, but seems to have gentle gain ramps. Even the main big volume knob seems to have a little slight delay ramp up when you bring up the gain....I may be imagining that, I didn't test it or anything. Anyways, the result is pleasing. The feel of the main knob is great-- just enough smooth resistance. It's not detented, but prefer it not to be. It does have bold silk screened tick marks that make it easy to have set monitor gain for different applications.

The sound quality is very good. When my Revive modded Monitor Station V2 bit the dust, I rented a stock one locally while I waited for the Nero to be available in the US. I noticed a palpable difference after using the Revive modded one for so long, so props to those guys-- they do great work. So, to hear the Nero after working on the stock Presonus for a couple weeks, it just sounds completely transparent and much better in regard to stereo image. The converters sound very usable and transparent to me as well, and is one of the features I was glad it has, especially optical in. Audient claims that headphone 1's amp is "monitor grade", whereas 1-4 are loud but lower quality, and this does appear to be true-- headphone one sounds fantastic on my Audio Technica M40X's and consumer Sol Republics.

Ok, so I gave it 4 stars on features for a couple reasons-- none of which were deal breakers for me. The first being that the unit has talkback (int or ext mic) that you can route to headphone amps 2-4. It also has a "cue in" that would presumably be your headphone mix, that you can route to the headphones, and or route it to your monitors to check it/set it up. However, there is no "cue out", as in balanced L/R to go to your headphone system....I don't know why you would need talkback if you just have people in the same room with you all plugged into this unit....people like me need talkback because the players are in the other room....and I need balanced out to go into my headphone system! So the ****ty workaround is to use one of the headphone outs (unbalanced, impedance issues, etc). The second thing is the built in talkback mic sucks....like really sucks. It's just crazy noisy...the presonus is way better. However, there is a mic input with selectable 48v. I plugged in a dayton omni test mic, and that sounds great. Ideally, I'd prefer to not have a mic taking up space, but I get that they had to make sacrifices to hit this excellent price point and still have the audio quality to the speakers be top notch (more important obviously). The final odd design choice is that the talkback dims the monitors, which is standard, but does not dim the headphone feed (why not make this selectable like many of the other features?). Basically they missed the mark for my use on the talkback features, but I'll still be able to deal with it.

Overall very happy with this unit.