In Summary

Loudspeaker correction for studio monitoring is nothing new, but affordable hardware to bend speakers’ sounds into shape certainly is. ARC Studio promises the ‘magic box’ experience but does it deliver? We take a listen.

Going Deeper

For all the talk around high quality loudspeaker monitoring, many conversations skip the effect of the room on what our speakers are telling us. Understanding that the speakers, their positioning, the listener’s position, and the room together form an electro-acoustic system is essential. Good monitoring in a suitable room with appropriate acoustic treatment to address standing waves and reflections are the cornerstones of good monitoring but ‘Room Correction’ or more correctly Speaker Calibration solutions also play an important role in good monitoring.

No amount of fancy DSP can fix smeary imaging or transients that sound like someone flicking a ruler on a table, but what corrective treatments can do so well is some of the necessary fixes in the frequency domain. This can be across the spectrum, but perhaps most noticeably in the mids and lows. This can be a life-saver. Calibration can flip all those bumps where the room’s dimensions interfere with all of your speaker designer’s hard work.

IK Multimedia ARC Studio - What Is It?

Many reading this will be familiar with some of the hardware correction boxes that have been out there for some time. Lauded by studio owners, their results are obvious to anyone who before then had wondered why their system wasn’t sounding £10k better than their Hi-Fi. Until now, in hardware form this tech came a big price tag.

ARC Studio is an affordable hardware correction processor. Doing the same job as those loudspeaker correction boxes before it, ARC Studio is different because of its tiny footprint both on the desktop and on your bank balance. Backed with IK Multimedia’s accompanying ARC Analysis and ARC 4 apps, anyone with one of these little gizmos can measure and manage their room’s quirks, before bending signals back into shape through ARC Studio itself. The system isn’t all about ‘just’ correction though; invaluable tricks such as being able to superimpose the sound of well-known playback systems onto the correction is one. Another really neat trick is being able to swing the correction’s sweet spot for the client’s listening position.

IK Multimedia ARC Studio - Key Benefits:

• Compact digital room correction processor.

• Improves even untreated or makeshift spaces - generate correction profiles in just minutes.

• Switch sweet spots for clients, test mixes through virtual monitor profiles and common “real-world” playback systems.

• Includes ARC measurement mic and software.

IK Multimedia ARC Studio - Technical:

• AKM Velvet Sound conversion.

• 120 dB dynamic range, ultra-low THD and jitter.

• Natural or linear phase correction.

• Set upper/lower frequency correction limits.

• Up to 9 target curves to fine tune the in-room response.

IK Multimedia ARC Studio - What Do We Think?

Julian Rodgers

I was looking forward to trying this little box. The ARC Studio fills a previously vacant niche in the market. I’ve been a SonarWorks user for several years and I think their interface and semi-automated measurement is the standard by which others are judged. I’ve used ARC before when testing the IK Multimedia iLoud Precision 5 monitors. I found the inclusion of a MEMS microphone for measurement a great idea and the software was effective in use but I was a little perturbed by the fact that the software had no way of verifying the placement of the measurement mic. SonarWorks have a system where a series of pulses from each speaker allows the software to identify exactly where the mic is. I now understand that SonarWorks have a patent on this system so this isn’t an omission on the part of IK not using a system like this.

Having measured my room with ARC and comparing the curve with SonarWorks I see that, if conducted properly, the results are broadly the same and I didn’t notice significant differences in the sonic results. The principal difference is practical - Whether you prefer having your calibration happen in hardware or software.

I’ve used Genelec’s GLM and Adam’s A Control software before. I’ve always felt that speaker calibration should happen in hardware, preferably in the speaker itself. My regular monitors are Neumann KH310s and these monitors don’t feature any DSP. A Trinnov would have been a way to achieve this but the cost is prohibitive, a Dirac system is a lower cost alternative but lacks a semi-automated measurement process. Being able to run calibration in hardware was previously either brand-specifc, costly, or involved a learning curve. At a stroke ARC fills this gap.

In terms of usability, it couldn’t be much simpler, the results are great, some people have voiced concerns about adding an extra stage of conversion. I’m unconcerned about this. The improvement offered by correction outweighs any potential effects on the sound. My only issue is that it only allows the upload of a single profile. Luke mentions something similar in his contribution below but rather than for headphones, I’d like a second profile so I can switch between sitting and standing with my sit-stand desk (my monitors move with the desk). The solution is easy. Just store profiles for sitting and standing positions and upload the relevant one to the hardware or just run it from software when in the less frequently used position.

The additional features like emulation of alternative monitors aren’t interesting to me. I’ve tried these features on other products and this isn’t a comment on the execution on this product, just that its a feature I don’t want. The thing I do want is a small, affordable speaker calibration product and IK Multimedia have filled that gap with a very commendable product. It does what it sets out to do. The ability to use your regular, all-analogue monitors with speaker calibration without running any software might not sound like much but being able to do it, and for this price, is significant. To answer this article’s title question - Does it work? Definitely!

Luke Goddard

As a long-term user of SoundID Reference, I was really interested to give ARC Studio with ARC 4 a try. Not because I was anticipating any major improvement in sound quality, but more because hardware loudspeaker correction really appeals to me for a number of practical reasons.

Don’t get me wrong, software correction is a major boon for any studio whose room is sucking the truth out of mixes, but for me it has always been a bit of a faff in my opinion. Anything that makes forgetting to bounce without it a thing of the past, or something that works exactly the same for any DAW or app on Windows or Mac including system audio has my attention. Until now, anyone who wanted a uniform experience for them all needed either on-board DSP or very deep pockets.

ARC Studio is very modestly priced for what you get, but if you’re expecting it to be cheap and cheerful you’re not going find it - the build is good and hardware implementation is excellent. Clearly its electronic design is the thing that will impress many - it certainly really impressed me. The Correction button switches what sounds like a true relay inside the box, so you can even run un-corrected without any power on ARC Studio at all. Freely plugging and unplugging the power while it is passing audio does not cause any thumps or bumps, and the whole thing’s physical presence is pretty convincing.

If you were wondering whether or not you can run ARC Studio truly standalone without even the USB connected to a computer, the answer is yes. That means that as long as you’ve hit Store in ARC 4 (with USB connected!) to upload profiles onto ARC Studio, it will still do its thing. That also means that a brief encounter with a laptop makes it useful in any long-term application requiring loudspeaker correction, and hats off to IK, because the setup is trivially simple.

For me, ARC Studio, on paper at least, ticks nearly all the boxes and could solve many problems. If it could store a second profile across a built-in headphone output, that would make it perfect, but that’s not really what ARC Studio is for. For now, bending headphone feeds (something that my other system does really well) is something that would need to be done another way.

In terms of sound, it does sound different to SoundID Reference, but only largely because the way both systems measure is different. In my case my main monitors’ ARC 4 profile serves up less of a lift at the top and bottom, making for a slightly more mid-forward sound overall. But quirks aside, does ARC Studio work? For set-and-forget loudspeaker correction, yes it does. The excellent implementation of what it does, either connected or unconnected to a computer, makes it a true long-term hardware solution for mixes that speak the truth.