IK Multimedia’s ARC Studio room correction promises a monitor upgrade like no other…
Last month, IK Multimedia released ARC Studio, a standalone hardware processor for its newly-updated ARC 4 acoustic room correction software that promises to “instantly upgrade” your studio monitors.
To give you a primer on the concept, room correction software compensates for the acoustics of the room your monitors are placed in by analysing the acoustic profile, identifying problematic frequencies and adjusting the output of your monitors accordingly. Everything from a room’s size and shape to the furniture in it can dramatically affect its acoustics; room correction accounts for this to achieve a neutral frequency response.
IK Multimedia have been in the room correction business for a while; previous iterations of its ARC software were designed to run on your machine, whereas ARC Studio gives you the opportunity to run the software on a dedicated processor that sits in between your interface and your monitors. There are a number of benefits to this approach, such as eliminating the need to place the ARC 4 plugin on the master bus of a project or introduce additional latency to your monitoring setup.
ARC Studio arrives bundled with a precision MEMS measurement microphone that’s used to help measure the acoustic profile of your listening environment through the ARC 4 software and compensate accordingly, delivering “controlled low-end, tighter transients and pinpoint stereo imaging”. Separate profiles can be created, stored and instantly recalled for the purposes of different monitors, listeni
