These speakers prove you can have powerful and accurate sound in ANY roomAdvertorial feature in partnership with IK Multimedia
You spend a lot of time and effort putting your studio together. But, sometimes, there’s one crucial factor that’s overlooked in getting the best results: a studio of any size, from a spare room at home to a professional facility, is sonically imperfect – and each one is different.
Monitor speakers are designed and tested in acoustically ‘dead’ anechoic chambers that offer a neutral response with no reflections. But a real space with irregularly positioned walls, windows and rafters behaves completely differently when it comes to sound.
IK Multimedia’s new iLoud Micro Monitor Pro speakers, the professional version of the company’s popular iLoud Micro Monitors, solve this problem by offering built-in room correction by quickly connecting the special, bundled MEMS microphone.
IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitor Pro. Image: Press
Rather than requiring a dedicated audio interface, the iLoud MM Pro monitors can tune their frequency response to any space or any placement automatically without the need for a computer or external box. Connect the microphone to each speaker’s XLR socket, press the Calibrate button and they will tune themselves automatically. Incredibly, each speaker takes just two minutes to calibrate.
Calibration is vital because it can be difficult to jaudge how the shape of the room is affecting your perception of a mix. Does the low-end sound bigger than it actually is because of the monitors’ proximity to a wall, or are high frequencies being lost because of poor monitor placement? It’s very easy to mix a track based on the sound in the room but then find that when played back in another location or on a different system, the balance is wrong.
The aim, of course, is to achieve a sonically accurate picture of your music. While some studios can mitigate these issues with acoustic treatment, that’s a costly process that’s also not usually possible in smaller home studios. Even if correctly installed it doesn’t guarantee to fix everything and it doesn’t help at all if you have to move between mixing locations.
IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitor Pro. Image: Press
While the popular iLoud Micro Monitors are great performers, the new Pro model is the first to offer this calibration fully built into the speakers. And, of course, it also works with IK’s included X-MONITOR software should you want to achieve even more accurate results, do an A/B comparison or even quickly hear how your mix sounds in different environments, like in a car or on a smartphone. Furthermore, it also has the capability of emulating the sound of other popular speaker models.
This speedy auto-calibration is especially useful since they are ultra-portable yet offer superb reproduction, meaning they can travel with you without much hassle and then tune themselves to whatever space you happen to find yourself in. Suddenly the compromises associated with compact speakers are no more. And they’re great for using in tandem with larger speakers in a more permanent studio setting too, a common technique in studios for making a mix sound good on different types of monitors.
IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitor Pro. Image: Press
Without room calibration, moving to a new space to mix would introduce a whole new set of acoustic variables. In short, you wouldn’t really know what the space was doing to the sound. But with the automatic calibration on the iLoud MM Pro speakers — plus the manual switches for LF and HF shelving — you can be confident that your soundstage is accurate. And all without any tedious experimentation with speaker positioning.
In addition to established studios or producers working on the move, the iLoud MM Pro monitors are also perfect for smaller home studios where space can be at a premium. Not only do they offer rich, room-filling and accurate sound but the quick and easy room calibration can be even more important in these kinds of imperfect spaces. Plus they bring this technology to a much wider audience since you don’t need to invest in lots of extra gear or even necessarily be an expert in acoustics to tune your speakers to your space.
You might have thought that room calibration meant installing large, expensive baffles — indeed, much of the time it has. With this new generation of self-tuning portable monitors, however, accurate reproduction is available anywhere, be it in your pro studio, home studio or even on the road.
Whatever kind of music you make, you can be sure that it will sound its best when mixed on a system you can trust.
Learn more at IK Multimedia.
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