IK Multimedia Unveils ARC Studio Advanced Room Correction System Automatically Improves Your Studio Monitoring
IK Multimedia’s hardware room correction system ARC Studio, promising to ‘instantly upgrade your studio monitors’. This standalone processor is designed to run the new version of IK’s room correction software, ARC 4.
IK Multimedia has announced the release of ARC Studio, a standalone hardware processor for its newly-updated ARC 4 acoustic room correction software that promises to “instantly upgrade” your studio monitors.
Room correction software compensates for the acoustics of the room your monitors are placed in by analyzing its 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 has been in this game 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’s a number of benefits to this approach, eliminating the need to place the ARC 4 plugin on the master bus of a project or introduce additional latency to your monitoring set-up.
ARC Studio arrives bundled with a precision MEMS measurement microphone that’s used to 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 different monitors, listening positions and room configurations.
In addition, ARC 4 now offers monitor emulation, so you’re able to emulate the frequency and phase response of well-known studio monitors from other manufacturers, hi-fi speakers and even mobile devices to get a sense of how your mix will sound on other systems.
- For pro studios, whether DAW-based or console-based, ARC Studio with ARC 4 offers sonically transparent correction and custom-tuning for any monitoring setup from nearfields to mains, while preserving the inherent system’s sonic quality.
- For DAW-based studios, ARC Studio eliminates the need to insert the ARC 4 plug-in on the master bus of a project and preserves zero-latency monitoring setups. It also lets you listen other sources, like streaming music, with acoustically corrected monitoring.
Designed and manufactured in Italy to exacting specifications, the ARC Studio hardware boasts a 120 dB(A) analogue input to analogue output dynamic range, 0.5Hz-40kHz frequency response, and ultra-stable clocking. The company says it offers the transparency and accuracy of mastering-grade converters at a far more affordable price.
ARC Studio – Make any studio monitors sound better (including the ARC 4 software and measurement mic) is priced at $/€299.99, but existing ARC users can upgrade for a discounted price. ARC 4 – Mix faster and more confidently than ever
can be purchased on its own for $/€149, or $/€199 with the measurement mic.
