JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com. I'm at the IK Multimedia booth with David Barbey, and you are the designer of ARC. Tell me a little bit about ARC.

DAVID BARBEY: Yes. It's a system that is designed to correct the acoustics of your room. So, ARC stands for Advanced Correction System, and it's been done in collaboration with the Audyssey Laboratory's team which they have a very good technology which is called MultEQ. This technology allows for correcting various areas of your room, and this is a key important factor in this field because you are not usually working obviously in the same position in your studio, or you are not usually working alone in your studio. You usually have your client with you or your coworkers. So, this system helps in effectively correcting the sound of the room, for example in front of the desk and on the client couch at the same time.

Another good advantage of this system is that it is aligning both in the frequency and the time domains. So, you are not getting that skewed-up sound that you get commonly on monitor speakers when you hook up an equalizer to them. That's the main reason why usually audio engineers do not like equalizing their monitors because of their completely skewed up phase response you get doing that. This system is actually not affecting in a bad way the phase response of the monitoring setup. It isn't -- Even though in the opposite direction, so it is even optimizing the time alignment of the listening. So it’s -- For example, it's reducing the early reflection from the side walls, it is almost perfectly aligning the subwoofers to the satellites and so on. Everything is done automatically. The user has to take a minimum of 12 and a maximum of 32 measurements in the room by using the microphone that is provided together with the system.

So, you have two software components. The first one is the measurement application that is a Mac and PC standalone application, wizard based so it's a step-by-step, very simple utility that sends the test signals to the speakers and record from the microphone the behavior of the room, and then you have a multi-platform plugin that you should keep inserted on the stereo bus of your DAW while working and while listening to the speakers. This is the part of the product that is applying the correction that you are reassigning to the audio.

JOE WALLACE: Now what platforms are supported? What DAWs will handle ARC?

DAVID BARBEY: It is a multi-platform plugin that supports VST, Audio Unit, and RTAS both on Mac and PC.

JOE WALLACE: Well thank you very much for your time. We've been talking about ARC at the IK Multimedia booth at AES. I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com.