Review: IK Multimedia ARC System (Mac/Win)

Oct 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           
 

A SOFTWARE-BASED SYSTEM TO CORRECT YOUR STUDIO'S ACOUSTICS

The measurement process goes fairly quickly, and once you've completed it, the software calculates an EQ curve and prompts you to name the preset. It then lets you select a speaker icon to graphically represent your speaker type when you call up a preset. (The graphic reminder is helpful if you have multiple monitors in your studio, because you have to change ARC presets each time you switch speakers.)

Open the DAW

To put your measurements to work, you open the ARC System plug-in within your DAW and insert it either on the master bus or, preferably, on a dedicated monitor bus, assuming you have a multioutput interface and your DAW allows it. I'll explain why in a moment.

The plug-in opens in a large window featuring a level meter, a trim control, a correction on/off switch, and several pull-down menus. The Measurement menu lets you choose the EQ preset that resulted from your measurement process. The Target Curve menu provides several additional presets to further tweak the room response if desired. Besides the default Flat setting, you can choose high-frequency rolloff, midrange compensation, and a curve that offers both.

The plug-in also displays a graph that shows helpful comparative data from the measurements: the original EQ curve of your monitors, the new curve with the ARC processing applied, and the frequency response after the Target Curve is enabled.

Once you've found the best setting for your room, the idea is to do your mixing while monitoring through the ARC plug-in with the correction on. When you're ready to bounce your mix down, you turn the correction off (assuming you have the ARC plug-in on the master bus; if you have it on a monitor bus, you can leave it on because it won't affect your mix).

Although turning off ARC before bouncing seems counterintuitive, it actually makes sense. By mixing while listening through ARC's processing, you're setting levels, EQ'ing, and adding effects with the corrected acoustics as your guide. You're making mixing decisions with ARC's processing compensating for the acoustic inaccuracies of your space. In a sense, ARC's EQ curves are fooling you into mixing as if you were in a “flat” room. That's why, if you're using ARC on your master bus, you must remember to bypass the plug-in before bouncing. Otherwise, you'd be redundantly adding the ARC processing, and you'd totally skew your mix.

One problem I ran into is that it's easy to forget to turn the ARC processing off when it's time to bounce. That's because it's basically a set-and-forget system. You don't need to interact with it except at the beginning of a session when you're opening the plug-in and getting levels set, unless you're switching between monitor pairs. When I first began mixing with ARC, I found that I often left it on by mistake and had to rerun my mix. My life was made easier after I inserted the ARC plug-in on an aux bus that fed a separate output pair — other than the main L and R — for monitoring.

Another awkward aspect of the ARC System's architecture — specifically the fact that it does its processing from within your DAW — is that once you've bounced your mix and you want to listen back to it in your studio, you need to import your mixed track back into your DAW (or into a 2-track editor that lets you monitor through plug-ins) with the ARC plug-in turned on. This is necessary in order to hear the music as you mixed it; that is, with ARC compensating for your room's acoustics. (According to IK, a solution to this problem is in development.)

Into the ARC

Those issues aside, the most important question about the ARC System is: how well does it work at flattening the response of your studio? To help answer this, I tested the system both in my studio, which has acoustic treatment (both absorber panels and bass traps), and in another room in my house that's completely untreated.

Not surprisingly, the differences in my treated studio were mostly subtle ones. There was a little less tubbiness in the monitors, and slightly more present highs when listening with the ARC processing on. The stereo image seemed to shrink a tiny bit when the processing was engaged.

In the untreated room, the sonic differences were much more dramatic. That room is of medium size and has a rectangular shape, and the speaker system in it is an inexpensive consumer 2.1 setup.

In that room, the comparative graph in the ARC plug-in showed that the room had a significant bump in the low end and lower midrange. With the ARC processing switched on, that bump went away. To compare the difference, I listened to mixes of songs that I was very familiar with. Sure enough, with it on, everything sounded clearer, less muddy, and more open. According to IK, one of ARC's strong points is its ability to make a bad-sounding room usable, and this was born out in my testing.

Mix and Match

I did quite a bit of mixing through the ARC System in both the treated and untreated rooms, and I was a little surprised to find that I didn't hear a major change in how those mixes translated to other speaker systems. Oddly, in my treated space, ARC's reduction of bass, which aimed to flatten the response, actually helped cause me to put too much bass into several mixes. Even in the untreated room, the differences between mixes done with and without ARC were less dramatic than I had expected.