It Might Get Loud

RATING

PERFORMANCE

BUILD QUALITY

ERGONOMICS

VALUE

WITH FEW of us straying far from home these days, or from our computer with its constant stream of information, entertainment, hope, and fear, desktop audio is having a moment. For this reason, many are discovering a need for something better than the crappy 2.1-channel “computer speaker” systems we bought back in the early ‘aughts. What we need is an ultra-compact active monitor—like IK Multimedia’s iLoud MTM.

Good product, bad name. In its defense, Italian manufacturer IK has a long tradition of naming its offerings, at first mostly software, iSomething or iOther. The MTMs, as I’ll call them (it stands for midrange-tweeter-midrange), are black-plastic designs about the size of a half-gallon of milk. While far from luxurious, their lozengelike form somehow manages to come off as elegant and even classy. More important, they’re crammed with intelligent technology and features.

The driver complement on each MTM consists of a pair of 3.5-inch mid/woofers flanking a 1-inch silk-dome tweeter, with packaging efficiency maximized to achieve all-but-full-range performance from a speaker just 11 inches tall. On the big side of small, the MTMs nevertheless looked and felt perfectly in scale