ARC ROOM CORRECTION
Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:11 pm
My organ is located in the lower part of my split level living room. It is a long small room with a part of the ceiling lowered (2m). I have used noise damping foam at the lower part of the ceiling and behind my organ. Despite the isolation ,I still have to do a lot of revoicing of my sample sets to correct the roomnodes/resonances. When I make a recording, I record the organ with the voicing suited for my room. Playback in other rooms will, because of this voicing, give wrong results. The only voicing I want to perform is to suit my taste. On the internet I found some solutions to (digitally) correct your room or studio. 1e the KVR Ergo. This is an external sound card with room correction but it lacks 64bit drivers for the sound card. 2e JBL MSC1. This device has to be plugged in between the output of the sound card and the input of the amplifiers. The software works with windows 64bit. The disadvantage is the extra AD-DA conversion in the device to apply the filtering. 3e IK multimedia ARC. This is a 32bit plugin for DAW applications like Reaper, Sonar etc. The 32bit software to measure the room works perfectly in windows7 64bit and the 32bit plugin with the correction works very well in my Reaper 64 bit. There are many 64bit DAW’s that accept 32bit plugin’s! ARC comes with a omnidirectional microphone. Your sound card must accept balanced 48V microphone inputs. So I decided to take the plunge and I ordered the ARC VST plugin. I connected the mike and performed the measurements suggested in the manual. I was amazed to see the measured frequency curve of my room. It looked like the Swiss Alps!! Then I put the ARC plugin in the path behind the SIR2 reverb plugin (N.B. I always record the organ before entering the plugins and then apply reverb. during the mastering). I expected the sound to be about the same but with less nodes. The result blew me away!! The bass ranks tightened and the midrange opened and became much more transparent. I could hear details like the tracker noise and the overblowing oft the pipes much better even with full registrations. The only drawback is that the sound tends to be a bit more bright. You can apply the HF roll off filter(fixed!) supplied with ARC or use a equalizer VST like I did so I can follow my own taste. It feels that all my sample sets have had a major upgrade. I could not hear any increase in latency. So it is possible to correct room defects while playing your favorite organs. Does anyone has the same experience?
Jan Loosman
Jan Loosman