Review: IK Multimedia ARC Studio

Of course it is. It had to be. 150Hz. I’m sure future generations of enhanced humans will have a switchable 150Hz notch filter implanted into their heads. It’s nothing but trouble. Sure enough, my studio needed a lot less 150Hz at the listening position and ARC Studio obliged. As soon as I engaged the ARC Studio correction it put the lows and low-mids into focus – solid and controlled – while also helping to reveal more of the presence frequencies. The difference was so stark I recoiled in shock and delight.
Room correction systems are known to be pricey, or at least costly enough to price the people and studios who need it most out of the market. ARC Studio is reasonable enough to put room correction within reach of anyone serious about balanced and reliable monitoring.
HOME STUDIO SAGA
As it happens, ARC Studio found me right when I needed it. Last year I cleared out a space that was formerly bit of a rumpus room and part-time rehearsal studio. I was eyeing-off the room to be a really good production space, and as part of that I wanted it to sound great. I bought a pair of Kali Audio IN-8 three-ways and a Kali Audio WS-12 sub, convinced this combo would help me have fun producing music and be accurate enough to use for equipment reviews.
But I was also aware I needed to first calm the space down acoustically. I was lucky enough to have access to some surplus Megasorber 50mm acoustic bats which I stuck to the walls and ceiling to help tamp-down the first reflections. I wasn’t getting super-forensic with the acoustic work, I thought I’d just get the room under control before I did further analysis.
After this prep work I couldn’t wait to set up the Kali monitors and bask in the results. Regrettably, frustratingly, it sounded terrible. I tinkered with the WS-12 settings – crossover, phase, etc etc. But the low mids disappeared and the overall sonic presentation was trashy.
In the end I bypassed the sub and made do – putting it all in the too-hard basket for another day. Maybe the disheartening aspect was knowing I’d be forced to get lost in acoustic remediation and endless tinkering. I wanted to produce and listen to music.
FRESH START
ARC Studio landed and I felt like I had a chance at a fresh start. First up, I pulled all the gear out of the space to attempt to find a better starting position for my monitoring. One key difference was that my daughter’s Pearl drum kit was now out of the room and I had some more leeway with where to put my listening position. I also raised the sub off the ground and turned it 90°. I’m not going to pretend that any of this was more than ‘suck it and see’, but finding an optimal listening positioning isn’t always something you can work out on a calculator – at least not in my experience. Naturally, if your studio is designed from the ground up, in concert with an acoustician, then that’s another kettle of fish. But most of us are simply attempting to get the best result from squatting in an existing room.
Regardless, I now felt I had a solid, if unremarkable, starting point for the ARC Studio to do its work.






NEED TO KNOW
IK Multimedia ARC Studio
Advanced Room Correction System






PRICE
A$650 / US$299



CONTACT
ikmultimedia.com.au
sound-music.com



PROS

Great results
Interesting cross referencing possibilities
Standalone hardware solution



CONS

Another stage of conversion



SUMMARY
IK takes what its learnt with ARC room correction software and packages it into a hardware-based system that’s powerful and effective without breaking the bank. Chances are, you’ll be surprised by what your studio monitors are capable of when your room quirks are ironed out.


ARC SETUP
Setting up ARC Studio is fairly straightforward. I had a couple of false starts and a few head scratching moments but even still, was ready to roll in under an hour.
Start by downloading ARC4 Analysis, a different app to the ARC Studio management program.
ARC Studio ships with a measurement mic. It’s nothing special (it’s got a little MEMS capsule… certainly not something you’ll repurpose for your main vocals recording) but that doesn’t seem to matter much and you are free to use another measurement mic if you have one. Certainly the cheaper measurement mic helps to keep the overall cost of the system down.
The Analysis app will take you step-by-step through the process of pinging your room. I chose the more comprehensive 21-position measurement process. Effectively you’re taking a bunch of measurements around where your head is most likely to be in your listening position.
Once you’ve completed this process, load the calibration file to the ARC Studio box.
If you move your monitoring position or if you have another space you think would benefit from room correction you can rinse/repeat and have different rooms loaded into ARC4.










CUTTING TO THE CHASE
Look, I know half the people reading this review will be thinking at this point – ‘would you get to the point, already!’ But I hope the other half can relate to my mundane, everyday challenges of achieving a half decent-sounding room to record and produce music. And, as a result, can hopefully relate to my delight in getting there, in no small part thanks to ARC Studio. Anyway, let’s look at the system:
The system is essentially a box that contains the EQ correction that sits inserted between the main outputs of your mixer/interface and your monitors – 2 x XLR inputs and 2 x XLR outputs.
The front panel has two LEDs showing power and signal and a Correction button that turns a relay on/off to bypass the EQ.
If you want to mess with the settings in the box you need to connect your computer to it via USB.
Spark up the ARC4 software and most of the UI’s real estate shows you your room’s frequency readings and ARC Studio’s corrected frequency readout (I’ll talk about how to take the measurements in a separate box item). An additional thick white line shows the target curve. You can change your target curve, either by selecting one of the target room presets, creating your own target curve, or choosing one of the 20+ ‘Virtual Monitor’ presets. The ARC Studio correction EQ changes to get the output sounding as close to the target curve as possible.
The Virtual Monitor presets are interesting to explore. For translation purposes you can click on the Smartphone or Bluetooth Speaker presets which monster your sound but give you a good idea of how your mix will survive in the real world. Elsewhere, the presets aim to emulate other well known studio monitors (White ’80s or Yellow 5s are two examples of the selection). Will this allow someone familiar with NS10s to mix in your space, confident the mix will sound the same when they take it back to their studio? I’m not sure if that’s the promise, but it does provide options and will allow people to more easily find their comfortable monitoring space. Auditioning the combinations can be mind-bending. I settled on a Standard Control Room target curve and left the Virtual Monitor settings alone.
Now that I have the settings I’m most comfortable with, I don’t necessarily need to have the ARC4 software running, I’ll get the benefit of ARC Studio knowing the settings are baked into the ‘box’.





EXTRA CONVERSION STAGE: IK MULTIMEDIA RIGHT OF REPLY
“In general, we do agree that adding an additional A/D and D/A conversion is not ideal. For this very reason, the total transparency of the A/D and D/A conversion and the analogue front end/back end has been one of the main design goals from the start of this project.
Conversion quality has substantially improved over the years, and the Velvet Sound converters used in ARC Studio – in addition to having formidable specs – sound amazing. The performance of this A/D and D/A conversion is transparent practically under all conditions. Essentially, the improvement of the listening environment provided by the ARC system by far surpasses any possible ultra-small change on the sonics caused by the added AD and DA, if any.”









RESOLUTION
ARC4 features a control to adjust the resolution of the correction filter to use more or fewer frequency bands. Depending on the room’s sonic signature, this can achieve a more surgical correction, or a broader, smoother balance. Try it and find out.
Natural mode improves the phase response, while Linear Phase maintains the original inter-channel phase response, which may be preferable in certain rooms and conditions.












GET A ROOM
As I write this review in my studio listening to mixes and Spotify I’m delighted and grateful to ARC Studio. But like any item of studio equipment there are always caveats and potential ‘gotchas’.
ARC Studio isn’t magic. It won’t make your $100 five-inch speakers sound like $50,000 three-way mastering monitors. Similarly, if your room and your monitoring position is hopelessly compromised then don’t expect ARC Studio to work miracles.
In other words, still do the work. Do your best with what you have, to acoustically bring your room to heel and to experiment with your listening and monitoring positions to make the best of what you have.
ARC Studio aims to democratise room correction – it’s priced well – but pricier systems are already on the market and have advantages that are worth exploring if you have the money. ARC Studio is a bit different in that it’s not hosted by your computer (like IK’s software-only ARC efforts), or indeed hosted in the studio monitor’s DSP. The good news is that ARC Studio takes the processing load away from you music computer but it does represent an additional stage of A/D D/A conversion into your signal chain. My sense is that for ARC Studio’s target market this isn’t an issue – the benefits of the work ARC Studio does far outweighs any potential nasties introduced by the extra stage of conversion. It’s worth noting that ARC Studio’s converter specs are very solid, but if you’ve invested in top-draw conversion then ARC Studio won’t be for you.
My final thought is around ‘known unknowns’. Most of us know our studio monitoring is compromised but we spend years becoming familiar with the sound of our monitors in our own rooms and we compensate for those issues. We end up doing that innately and instinctively but we will also listen back through other monitors, in the car etc, and/or we might use an RTA to get a visual on what exactly is going on in our mix and do our best to match that to a target. So perhaps you feel like you’re doing okay, and that ARC Studio has the whiff of snake oil about it, or at least an unnecessary studio gizmo. My experience suggests that ARC Studio has a very real place in many, many studios. You may be surprised just what your monitors are capable of – tighter, more revealing with improved depth and detail. I was.





SPECIFICATIONS
Audio

AD/DA converters: AKM Velvet Sound
Audio conversion and internal processing sampling rate: 96kHz
Audio conversion resolution: 24-bit
Internal processing resolution: 32-bit float
Frequency Response: 2Hz – 45.0kHz (- 2.0dB)
Dynamic Range: 120 dB (A-weighted)
THD (20-20kHz): 0.00035%
THD+N (1kHz@-1dBFS): -107dB
Channel Crosstalk (1kHz): -122.5dB
Max Phase Deviation: +7° 20Hz, +16° 22kHz
Input Impedance (balanced): 20kOhm
Output Impedance (balanced): 50Ohm
Maximum output level: +17dBu

Latency

Natural Phase mode: 1.4ms
Linear Phase mode: 42ms


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