While the Precision 5 also performed admirably in the larger control room environment, they did feel a tad underpowered for the space. So, to give the Precision 5 a more accurate representation of a real-world room they’d typically be set up in, I decided to put them through the paces at my (much smaller) home studio. In Use: Project Studio To sum it up MTM is best possible option for most music producers. If iLouds are out of your budget you may without a doubt save some money on buying audio interface, mics, soft and even (don't hit me) acoustic treatment. The calibration technology is perfect. 1 minute to spend and they sound absolutely precisely, accurately and beautifully if room you're working in is any better than an absolutely empty metal barrel. I am going to recommend the IK Multimedia iLoud MTM Monitors. What they do within their capability is excellent. I personally would not buy them because they don't get loud enough but you may have different priorities.

dBSPL response on the left is fine and shows very low distortion from midrange to upper treble. 96 dBSPL though shows "conduct unbecoming a pro monitor!" I could hear alien sounds as I ran the sweeps! Spec oddly says 101 dBSPL and I but not sure how they got that: I work in radio and post production for more than 20 years. I spent my last years on Yamaha‘s HS7 and Genelec’s 8030s. My studio is acoustically treated and everything is well calculated but you cannot defeat the room. The size of the space is something you have to accommodate to. To be honest my initial thought was to buy some decent passive hi-fi speakers and external amp for them. That's more serious stuff that many pro producers advice to use. So I was browsing Youtube looking for some comparison tests. And I found out that MTMs which I've being ignoring for quite a long time because of their size and price have some unique and undeniable advantages. Virtual tests can't be a ground for decision making but they helped me notice a solution for a problem I faced many times. The problem I'm talking about is translatability of your mixes.

IK Multimedia’s two studio monitors, the iLoud Micro Monitor and the larger iLoud MTM have created quite a stir in the music industry due to the combination of diminutive size and accurate sound. IK’s patent-pending Physical Response Linearization system tweaks performance in real-time to maintain solidity in the low end. There is some DSP wizardry going on behind the scenes here. It's EQ for sure, but there's also phase correction and it sounds to me like possibly some dynamic adjustments with volume level. The iLoud MTMs sound really, really good quiet. As you turn the volume up or down, it sounds to me like these are making some compensations for the Fletcher Munson Curve, or natural changes in our perceived frequency response as volume changes. They seem to stay balanced at lower volumes better than most monitors. I know that DSP is a somewhat controversial topic in audiophile circles, but these make a great argument for including the option in more products. IK has a long history of modeling analog equipment and DSP solutions for guitar players and engineers, and they've put that experience to good use here. I haven't had a chance to hear the Genelec 8341s, but it's really great that some of that technology is becoming available in more mass-market products. Before I flesh out the iLoud MTM EQ options there's one more feature of its internal electronics that justifies a mention, and that is that the internal signal processing is entirely digital (at 48kHz, 32 bit). This means that there's an A–D conversion on the signal input and subsequently a D–A conversion before the amplification stages. It also means that the iLoud MTM designers had the opportunity to introduce crossover filter profiles that optimise the benefits of the D'Appolito format, and to correct for overall system phase response. Both of which they did. The only downside of such DSP adventures is that they introduce around 3ms of overall latency, which you may or may not feel is significant. EQ Options I K Multimedia took the budget monitor market by storm with the ‘physics defying’ iLoud Micro and MTM monitors. I reviewed the iLoud MTM monitors in our September 2019 issue, and they haven’t left the meter bridge in the A Room at Coupe Studios (Boulder, CO) ever since! It’s no surprise that IK Multimedia has decided to expand the lineup, taking everything that made the Micro and MTM so popular and amping (pun intended) them up to the next level. Precision Overview

Following on from the popular iLoud Micro Monitor, the iLoud MTM introduces a double woofer system and the ability to tailor the sound to the room. Predicted in-room response is for far field listening in a typical room so not as applicable to monitors on a desk:Altogether there is 100W of output, hitting 103dB SPL. The onboard DSP allows for phase-coherency across the full frequency spectrum – a key feature of the unit, and one which makes the this speaker brutally ‘honest’. It really is clinical with your mixes, taking imaging to a level that we’d expect to hear from monitors at three times the price. I came to a thought of buying MTMs right after my 7 inch Tannoys went to hell. I mean literally burned out. Bad electrical grid to be blamed. I also owned 5 inch JBL's even before that. Seems like both the port and woofer (s) have resonances around 2 to 4 kHz causing slight response errors. There is a bass extension which I left in the default 50 Hz. All other settings were neutral during testing. As you see, I had to turn the gain way down to test the unit. So even though we have balanced input, sensitivity is quite high even in +4 dBu mode. Given the short distance to such monitors though, it is easy to go over the thresholds listed so use the tilt mechanism built into the base to point the tweeter at you.

Thanks to an advanced and effective shape of MTM's body and their DSP side they are able to really give you a possibility to hear mixes as they are. iLoud Micro Monitor wowed the world with the bass performance it delivered from a 3” speaker that “defied physics”. But iLoud MTM offers even more, with even bass response down to an astonishing 40Hz ideal for modern music styles. This small pair of studio monitors is not at all inferior in sound compared to the larger models. Its size makes it easy to fit into even the smallest studios. The sound is absolutely right for studio work, with a sufficiently neutral tone. The soundstage is a little less wide than on the larger monitors, but that’s not a big problem. Bass was controlled. The calibration system can be used to further optimise the sound. All in all, this is a great little speaker that we heartily recommend to everyone. Phase coherence. I had forgotten how much I love MTM designs (somewhat similar effect to coax speakers, but with significantly fewer negative side-effects IMHO). There's an immediacy to the transients, and a great sense of impact/punchiness.Maximum SPL @ 1m, one speaker playing, on axis: 103dB from 200Hz up sine wave, 95dB at 100Hz sine, 93dB pink noise