ILoud MTM €854

Over coming issues we’ll be focussing a little more on the monitors you listen to your music through, those being either ‘proper’ studio type speakers or headphones. Put simply, the better these are in terms of accuracy, the better your mixing experience will be. If what you hear is accurate, your actions will translate to mixes that should sound good anywhere.

Up until now, decent studio monitors have been expensive, but there are now several models out which deliver fantastic results for reasonable cash, and some, like these iLoud MTMs, do it with the desktop musician in mind.

The MTMs are DSP-controlled monitors; that is they are controlled digitally, and they can even ‘self adjust’ with a special calibration process, where a supplied microphone records the results of a filter frequency sweep. The speakers then adjust themselves according to those results, the thinking being they will adjust to overcome anomalies in your room. The best part is that this actually works, meaning that they aim towards more accuracy even in the most terrible-sounding of rooms.

“The result of all this is a speaker that presents as incredibly clinical and brutally ‘honest’,” we noted in our review, “and takes imaging to a level that we’d expect to hear from monitors costing three times as much. Subtle mid/high details that previously went unnoticed become perfectly audible, making corrective targeting of individual elements within the mix almost supernaturally easy. Low-end solidity and control are remarkable for a speaker of this size, too, and they never really seem to get fatiguing. For those with limited desk space, or seeking a surgical secondary pair to their main ‘fun’ monitors, the iLoud MTM really is a truly incredible solution.” Worthy winners of our Hardware of the Year award, then, and a truly exciting innovation in speaker technology.

270 » 10/10