Icon Pro Audio P1-M

The least disputed thing in the record, and the reason the P1-M exists. At 405 x 204 x 61 mm and 1.92 kg it is the shallowest eight-fader surface with a screen that anyone in these threads could find, and owners describe the same specific win over and over: a controller shallow enough to sit behind a keyboard with room left for your wrists, or to replace a Behringer X-Touch at half the desk area. Nobody in the set argues the other way. The one asterisk is a spec rather than an opinion — it runs on a 12 V mains adapter, not USB bus power, so it travels but never quite goes portable.

“The small size was the main reason why I bought it, since it allowed me to place my keyboard infront of the controller while having space left for my wrists.”

vagglyren, Steinberg Forums

“a more compact footprint that will fit comfortably into smaller studio setups”

Sound On Sound

Two different stories sit inside this aspect and they should not be blended. The touchscreen is not in dispute: five sources describe the sixteen-panel grid across five colour layers in the same delighted terms, because it solves a real problem — you can see what each key does, by name, without a paper overlay, and change it by dragging in Icon's iMAP editor. What splits sources is the mechanical feel, and it splits like a manufacturing lottery rather than a difference of taste. One Thomann owner reports fader motors barely audible if at all and buttons with a good, positive feel; another on the same page reports loud, stiff faders, a jog wheel that does not run smoothly and a chassis that rocks on the desk. The jog wheel is the one complaint that recurs across owners who otherwise like the box. A minor and separate ceiling, found by a Gig Performer user who went looking for it: the touchscreen labels are set in iMAP over USB and are not addressable over MIDI, so a host cannot relabel them on the fly.

The loudest split in the record, and the most lopsided — roughly four to one against, with the strongest critical voice being Icon itself. The P1-M talks Mackie Control to most DAWs and HUI to Pro Tools, plus a plain MIDI mode that Icon warns is "Not for mixing". Icon's own compatibility chart then says the quiet part out loud: Bitwig and MOTU's Digital Performer have native partnerships, everything else depends on community-written scripts for full functionality, and where no script exists, track colours and master meters may simply not work. That single sentence explains almost every complaint in the set — missing colour coding and unusable navigation in Ableton Live, Logic meters that stick and stop updating, Cubase functions that half-work, and plug-in control that dumps every parameter across the encoders in source order. Icon credits four volunteers by name for filling the gaps (bjoluc for Cubase, XFada for FL Studio, Driven by Moss for Reaper, Paul Henty for Studio One), and the owners who are happiest are precisely the ones running those scripts, or running DAWs where plain MCU is enough. Not every failure is Icon's: a Cubase 15 regression that broke P1-M input in November 2025 was Steinberg's, and was fixed in 15.0.6.

The consistent weak point, and the part owners meet before they meet anything else. iMAP is not a bundled extra — it is how the touchscreen is programmed and how firmware is installed — and the complaints about it are specific rather than vague: it forgets pre-assigned DAW templates, it can show one DAW while the hardware is set to another, and it will happily reinstall the same firmware version because it does not compare current against latest. Firmware itself has bitten owners in both directions: one buyer could not get past the first step of an update on two separate Windows machines, another updated to V1.08 and found pads stopped working in Pro Tools. Documentation was the other sore point, and it is the one that has visibly improved — the sharpest complaint about it dates from May 2025, and Icon's Help Center has since filled out with per-DAW articles updated through August 2026 and an official Logic script in beta. Improved, not fixed: a 24-channel owner still reported displays loading unpredictably in Sonar in August 2026.

“Software pretty buggy and I haven't found a way to properly customize it.”

antiwebbite, r/Reaper

“The control software (iMap) is somewhat buggy, sometimes it just "forgets" the pre-assigned DAW templates”

DJ Adam Wise, Thomann owner review

“It shipped with V1.05 2023-12-15 firmware and I am unable to put new firmware on it, the upgrade fails to the first step always.”

roculator, r/audioengineering

Everyone likes it out of the carton; the disagreement is about month three. The chassis is metal with a Kensington lock port, and the buyers who came from a Behringer X-Touch specifically wanted something more solidly made. Against that sit three durability reports: a third encoder starting to feel worn after a few months of use, a leg on the D4T display unit snapping during ordinary handling, and one unit that arrived with stiff faders, a rough jog wheel and a case that rocks. That last one is a single owner, but it is the same owner whose fader description directly contradicts another's on the same retail page, which is what makes unit variation the likeliest reading rather than a difference in expectation. Nobody reports a dead unit.

Plain, and plainly documented. One USB-C port to the computer, two quarter-inch footswitch jacks (User A and User B), a Kensington slot, and a 12 V / 2.5 A mains adapter that is mandatory — the manual is explicit that USB bus power is not enough. There is no 5-pin MIDI in or out, no Ethernet and no wireless, which matters if you expected to drive outboard from it. The compensating trick, and the one owners actually praise, is that a single USB connection can hold three DAWs open at once with hardware buttons to switch between them.

“Controlling 3 workstations is so convenient now.”

Rohan, verified buyer, B&H

The widest split in the record, and the two camps are not pricing the same object. Camp A prices the controller: $549 against $1,299 for an SSL UF8, in a smaller footprint, with a programmable touchscreen neither the SSL nor a Behringer offers. Camp B prices the configuration, because the P1-M on its own shows no track names at all — the $199 D4T display is what puts names, pan positions and parameter values in front of you, and more than one owner calls it necessary rather than optional. That takes the real figure to $669, against roughly $400 for a Behringer X-Touch Universal with scribble strips already fitted. From there the argument moves to whether the software risk is worth any saving at all: two owners in this set went to SSL instead, and one who bought the P1-M sold it and bought a Console 1. Notably, none of the negative voices disputes the hardware — the objection is that a cheaper surface that needs scripts and firmware patience is not actually cheaper.