Audient Nero Monitor Controller
NOBODY WANTS TO FUSS WITH CABLES AND HEADPHONES AND JACKS AND JUNK WHEN THEY’RE IN THE ZONE. NERO KNOWS, AND NERO CARES.
If you’re really serious about your music, you know that you need quality monitors to hear your recordings through. This is true whether you have a little setup in your house or a full pro studio. And the more you care about your sound, the more you realise your mix has to work through all sorts of different speakers. A perfectly neutral set of studio monitors won’t necessarily tell you everything you need to know about how your song is going to sound on a car stereo, a Sonos system, a little portable Bluetooth speaker, a pair of AirPods or blasting out of an old boom box.
HEAR ME!
Nero by Audient allows you to reference your mixes on up to three sets of speakers, so you can give your mixes the best possible chance of sounding as great as possible on as much equipment as possible. One way to look at it is as a comprehensive patch bay to send audio signals to speakers. Another way is to see it as something a little more abstract; something to help you make creative decisions.
The unit features four stereo analog inputs: two line-level inputs, one dedicated cue mix input and one Aux input (RCA or mini jack) plus optical and coaxial S/PDIF inputs, three speaker outputs and one assignable subwoofer output. It also includes four headphone outputs with flexible routing and individual volume controls and a talkback mic input to communicating with musicians out in the tracking room (and an internal mic for if you don’t have the space for or can’t be bothered with setting up a dedicated talkback mic). Of the four headphone amps, one is a dedicated monitor-grade amp so you can check your mixes in pristine quality with monitor headphones or test your mixes with various consumer headphones; the other three outputs are foldback-grade headphone amps. Say you want to assign the talkback mic’s output to three of the headphone outputs to tell the drummer, bass player and singer that the guitarist smells; you can configure such a setup in seconds then recall it whenever needed.
REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEBODY
That’s all great, but none of this would be worth a damn if Nero was difficult to use. Thankfully it’s set up with Smart Touchpoints that allow you to customise your workflow on the fly. You can configure the outputs and monitor controls to whatever combinations suit your needs - and it’s easy to do by simply holding down a Smart Touchpoint to put it into setup mode then selecting your routing options and pressing it again to save. You can also set any output permanently to mono: say you have a particular monitor setup to hear your mixes in mono, or maybe one of the musicians would prefer a mono mix in their cans to a stereo one. Easily done.
Oh and have you ever noticed that if you’re using powered monitors at low volumes, the one with the power amp built in is at a different volume to the other speaker that it’s feeding? Nero has Audient’s custom Precision Matched Attenuation Technology, which prevents any difference in volume between the left and right monitors or the unbalancing of your stereo image. During testing I used the Nero to select between several different sound sources: my main Presonus Eris monitors (fun fact: I bought a set of my own after reviewing them for this very magazine), a Roland JC-1 Bluetooth audio speaker, an old set of Edirol monitors that I don’t use often any more, and a set of Marshall Major II headphones (which are definitely not monitorstyle headphones, instead being voiced specifically to kick ass with rock mixes). Not only did Nero perform flawlessly from a technical standpoint but, most importantly, I never felt that it impeded my workflow or distracted me from what I was doing. For those of us who tend to record alone a lot, that can be a very big deal.
THE BOTTOM LINE
It’s worth pointing out that Nero is very tough and hardy, which you wouldn’t even think it would need to be if it’s just designed to sit on a desk rather than go on tour. But then again, who among us hasn’t thumped our desk in frustration at borking a mix, or carted half our gear to a rehearsal or something? Audient has made this unit much tougher than required so that it’s totally boofhead-proof.