Arc studios

agreed “nice”, but not mandatory in the sense you are not mixing the record yet ?

I am so used to tracking and mixing in my not so great but treated room on cans, that I just while tracking focus on my performance and capture, worry about mixing later.

I agree with what peeps say here though, if I was starting over, I’d get some professional acoustical advice, get the trinnov, then monitors etc.!!

I'm just going to copy and paste my post from the purple site, too long to retype...

First impressions.... I've had Sonarworks for years, so it's what I'm familiar with. I ran the correction with the arc mic they included last night and initially was a bit frustrated. Although overall the correction was really similar to what Sonarworks was doing (visually the graphs looked pretty much the same between the two apps), there was just something "off" with a lot of vocal tracks I was listening to. A bit phasey maybe. I tinkered a bit and went to bed because it had been a long day.

I got up this morning and read through the manual again before getting started. I had the Arc in "linear" phase mode, as well as the "Combined L/R" option on for some reason. I don't know if I misunderstood the settings last night or was just randomly hitting things to listen, but going back t0 "Natural" phase as well as turning off the "Combine L/R" helped a lot. Vocals are still a little bit different between Sonarworks and Arc, but at this point my perception is just telling me they're "different" as opposed to Arc sounding bad. I've worked on ATC monitors a fair amount in the past and it's a similar impression between how some things sound on ATC's as opposed to Barefoots that I prefer. I think I'm just going to have to adjust over a few days, for all I know it might be showing me things a bit more accuratly.

There's some other smaller things I'm hearing that aren't worth getting into yet as I'm still on the fence and learning. Bigger things I'm hearing on Arc are a VASTLY improved stereo image and punch. Going between Arc and Sonarwarks now this morning, it's like panning everything in 75% on each side when I go back to Sonarworks. That's really surprising. The punchiness difference is also surprising. It's almost like I'm getting a little more separation in the low end information with Arc. It's especially obvious when listening to bass guitar and kick drum interact with each other.

Although it's definitely impressive and "better", I'm a little cautious as it it being a good thing yet. Sometimes "better" isn't always more accurate. My Barefoot MM45's aren't the most exciting and fun speakers I've mixed on, but they've forced me to work harder in certain areas. It will be interesting to start mixing with Arc and see if those differences I'm hearing actually translate into better mixes. My concern is that Arc might be giving me a better sounding starting point where I could "theoretically" not work as hard at separating something like bass and kick drum because they're playing better with each other right out of the gate.

Who knows, I'm a day and a half in and might change my opinions completely after being in this a week. The only other thing I'll say is that I'm hearing absolutely no difference with the Arc hardware in and out of the chain. I'll do some more scientific tests when I get around to the video review, but I don't see it being a problem or something I'm going to obsess about.

Off to a good start, need to get to know it a lot more though! I was pretty frustrated last night but feel MUCH better this morning after reading the manual and adjusting settings a bit more.

No, I've hated 99.999% of the headphone profiles I've tried with sonarworks. Almost every single one of them has made the headphones sound horrible to my hears. The only pair of headphones I use regularly now are the Neumann NDH-20's. The profile they have for those is probably the worst offender of all the profiles I've tried. The funny thing is, I had the open back version of the Neumanns in here for a month or so (NDH-30), and I LOVED the sonarworks profile on those! That's the only time I've ever found a profile that worked well, go figure  .

I’ve grown to love the headphone correction in Sonarworks, but I hated it at first too. It was definitely an adjustment. Probably the biggest hurdle to get over was just how drastic of a change it was — the SW profile basically sounds nothing like your headphones as they come stock.

I’ve been using it with Sony 7506s for years now and I consider it indispensable at this point. Any time I turn the correction off, they sound offensively bright and nasty.

The key to getting along with it is to just turn the correction on and never look back. Use it all the time, especially when you’re just listening.

Of course, if you don’t ever mix in headphones, it’s probably not worth the hassle.

Here’s my review of ARC Studio. I’m not going to do the setup walkthrough or any of that other stuff everyone else has done in their videos. I did a walkthrough of my hybrid setup with SonarWorks so you can all get a general idea of how much of a pain in the ass it can be integrating software correction. I know I’ve seen a lot of comments from people that don’t understand why they would ever need this in hardware. That will be pretty self explanatory after watching…

The other big question was how transparent the hardware box is. I did a test in the video as well, I’m sure that will open up a can of worms and cause a lot of discussion. All I’ll say is that I cant hear any difference between the hardware in and out of the chain, so I’m happy…

I've had a few people comment about the "phase test" I did with the ARC Hardware, saying that I got those results because I didn't compensate for the delay in the hardware/plugin. I ran the test with the room correction part bypassed, so there shouldn't be any delay when set to bypass (I checked in the manual before doing it). Just to make sure, I opened the session and zoomed in as far as I could on the waveform for the clean and hardware passes. I attached a screenshot at the bottom, you can see where I set a marker between two of the peaks, they're in the exact same spot. There's no delay when the unit is in bypass.

SonarWorks has been buggy for me ever since I moved to the new Mac Studio and updated ProTools. SonarWorks told me to upgrade to the new version, I paid for the upgrade and it was even worse (you’ll notice in the video I’m back to using version 4). Really frustrating, so I was happy to move to the ARC if it sounded good.

I’ve gotten ARC to match SonarWorks pretty well. They both made the same adjustments to my room more or less. I’ve had to tweak settings in ARC a little bit to match what Sonarowrks sounded like. I’ve got that saved as a custom preset and will be jumping back and forth between that and “flat” for what ARC calculated. The results seem familiar enough to me that I’m not at all worried about moving to the ARC.

I wanted to add one more thing to the phase test I did with the ARC Studio hardware box to look at the transparency. This morning, it occurred to me that maybe the test wasn't nulling out completely because of a slight level mismatch. I went back in to my test files and tweaked the level by 0.2 dB and was able to get even MORE of a null! I've attached another screen shot below.

I feel like this proves my point even more: you're not going to hear a difference with the ARC Hardware box in the signal chain. All of that "left over" from the phase test was almost completely eliminated by a 0.2 dB level change. I know for a fact that I usually can't tell when the level on something changes even by half a dB, much less 0.2....

Matt, I'm a bit confused by your review. You said the ARC was giving you more punch, and better separation in low information. Yet you then have said a couple of times when you take ARC out you don't hear a difference in the signal chain. So how can their be no change if you are getting better punch and separation?

There’s two different variables happening. The first is the transparency of the ARC hardware box. When you take it in and out of the signal chain, I can’t hear any “box tone” of the unit. The hardware (without anything happening as far as room correction goes) is not going to mess with the integrity of your monitoring signal chain. It sounds completely transparent to me (and testing at this point has pretty much confirmed that).

The second, completely separate variable, is my opinion on what the room correction is doing and my opinion on that. That part is unrelated to the transparency of the hardware. One big concern is that adding a hardware variable to the signal chain is adding another stage of conversation into everything. I must have done a bad job of articulating those two thing separately. Hopefully that clears it up 

Did the first round of sweep tests. A couple areas in my room were fixed and a couple became worse from all the extra treatment. It's an ever shifting target.

Big question: How do you get Arc Studio to not clip? My worst dip is 7dB, so I figured changing the Trim to something lower than -7dB would keep the box from showing clipping, yet it still does. I even dialed it down to -15 and it still shows clipping on the box. I did store it but that doesn't seem to do it. Have to play around a bit more. The trim knob lowers the level of what I'm hearing, but even at it's most extreme setting, the box still shows clipping. Not intuitive. I guess I need to read the manual.