After being thoroughly impressed I signed up to review this for the next issue of Tape Op. I don’t have a fully formed opinion yet, but my initial reaction is that it’s an easy setup, sounds great and is way less quirky than the fully software based Sonarworks solution.
@fadersolo@mxtthxw@elsemusic hey scott, interesting! so basically you have to get one of these hardware boxes per pair of speakers that you want to correct, it looks like? for me, that would be focals + ns10s + auratone + boombox = 4 arc boxes. plus an additional ad/da round trip for everything, if i’m understanding correctly? very interested to read your final thoughts!
@hilljam@mxtthxw@elsemusic Yes, but you can probably skip the Auratones and the boombox or put it between your DAW’s output and your monitor controller. It is an extra AD/DA trip, but it’s affordable, just works, and so far doesn’t confuse my mac like Sonarworks sometimes does. It’s like an affordable Trinnov.
@fadersolo@hilljam@mxtthxw I'm interested that your Mac gets confused. I have an i7 Mac Mini, and it copes seamlessly with the SoundID Reference software.
My only observation is that it does seem to reduce the perceived available volume on the monitors.
@elsemusic@hilljam@mxtthxw TBH, I have less experience with Sonarworks. My partner’s have been running it on our 2018 i7 for years but seem to complain about it being flaky. Our setup is stupidly complicated tho: HDX card on the Mac communicating with interfaces (mostly a BURL) over Soundgrid. It all sounds great, but there are so many layers for failure.
I have been using my own machine since long before they installed Sonarworks and never bothered to install it after their anecdotes scared me off. My favorite thing about the Arc so far: once it’s configured it works no matter which computer is running and I have yet to install the software.
@fadersolo@elsemusic@mxtthxw it sounds like a great solution for a single-pair-of-speakers environment. and, honestly, buying one unit per speaker pair is not entirely unreasonable! out of reach of hobbyists, of course, and i hate to see systems that don't scale, but what can you do.
the next-level genius move would be for them to make a box that has a bunch of different pairs of outs for different speakers, and you could load a correction curve on each output 😎 now that would be killer!
@hilljam@elsemusic@mxtthxw I mean, it sounds like you’re describing the feature set of DADMan / Trinnov / etc. Those are currently selling for 10x the price of this little box. It does sounds like a killer design and I hope every audio interface is going to have a “monitor controller with room EQ” feature set built in within a couple years. Why wouldn’t they?! So maybe just wait for that. For now, I see this IK Arc box as something affordable for those of us in the middle.
With the Arc, it’s super fast to switch EQ curves. It wouldn’t be hard to shoot a curve for each speaker set and switch settings every time we switch monitors: our main issue is a 6 dB dip at 40Hz, which is well below the 100 Hz cut off for our only alt (which are NS-10s). Do you run Sonarworks after your monitor controller, switch the EQ curve for every speaker set, or just share one curve across everything?
@fadersolo@hilljam@mxtthxw I don't care to EQ my mono Avantone: its limited response is the point. And frankly, it doesn't make any appreciable difference to them whether I switch the Sound ID reference in or out.
I do have my primary headphones tweaked using a Sound ID preset to match the model; they're on a separate output, so no switching required.
@mxtthxw@hilljam Sound ID Reference by SonarWorks. I had only the headphones option at first, but sprung for the full package with measurement mic some months ago. It makes an immediate improvement.
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