Dispatch while he messes with the EQ you gave him (which is hooked up to your monitors) he is flattening out things that may be too hot, and raising things that are too low. So at the end of his analysis, you have a flat sounding (as well as good looking) monitor curve. The down side to this procedure is it only works that one sweet spot he analyzed in. If you have people sitting in the back of your room or people off to the side a bit, they may not hear good stuff. This is where ARC is
different because it does SEVERAL corrections and positions, not just your sweet spot. You basically run your corrections along the lines of what you see in the picture captioned "ARC Measurement". See all the little numbers? Those are the spots in which you would place your mic for ARC to correct that position of the room. I'll cover all this a bit later, but for the most part, you install it, set your mic the right way, get a
good level, and start correcting! From there you must use symmetrical placements for ARC to work. At the end of say, 18 positions on the mic, you're done. It saves the file and then you can use this in your DAW. To use it in your DAW, you open your DAW, put the ARC plug on your master bus, load up the correction you saved, and you should hear an incredible difference. That's the basic idea of it, but of course it goes a bit deeper than that. The downside is you have to remove ARC each time you export your audio. If you leave it on, it will add the correction to the mix. You don't want that…it's meant to correct your monitors, not your mix. Another downside is "well Danny, ok, now I've used it, it sounds great…but when I just listen to something through Windows Media player or something else, ARC is not on there to correct my monitors! How can I listen to something outside of my DAW?" Simple fix. You can either bring all the stuff you listen to into your DAW and add ARC to the bus, or you can get Winamp and have ARC load up automatically as a plugin. This way ARC will always be correcting your monitors…even for CD's that you listen to. I'll get to this later though. Let's go through what you would need to do if you bought ARC and wanted to do the procedure. I'll talk you through what worked for me and has worked in every room and monitor system I have used ARC on. Those of you that do not have ARC may not find this section of any use. So you may want to skip it. But all the other stuff I have mentioned above should at least get you in the right frame of mind and you may even decide to purchase this. If you do, you'll have the rest of this to get you through it the right way. If you don't have ARC and will not be reading further, thank you for reading this far. I hope this was helpful to you.
April 2012
www.WusikSoundMagazine.com
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