Users of ARC or Sonarworks Reference, did it work?

[jamcat]

Note this from IK:

"Please note that we're offering a 7-day grace period to purchase and register your qualifying product, which will end Sunday, November 7, at midnight ET.

If your hardware product arrives after that, please contact support as soon as it does so we can activate your Group Buy benefits."

https://www.ikmultimedia.com/news/?item_id=11269

[Toggle]

I don't think you can use an EQ profile

[Mind Riot]

Note this from IK:

"Please note that we're offering a 7-day grace period to purchase and register your qualifying product, which will end Sunday, November 7, at midnight ET.

If your hardware product arrives after that, please contact support as soon as it does so we can activate your Group Buy benefits."

https://www.ikmultimedia.com/news/?item_id=11269

Yeah, it arrived today and I registered it with IK and installed and authorized it on my DAW PC but it didn't give me access to the promo, so I sent off a message to support. It said they'll get back to me within a few days, so looks like it's some more waiting before I can pick some freebies.

It gets really, REALLY windy where I live. My house is on the floor of a windswept valley at the foot of a very large mountain, over 14,000 feet. So it gets loud and shakes the whole place when it's windy and I can't do any recording or testing with any microphones while it sounds like there's a hurricane outside.

If it clears up maybe I can dive into setting up ARC tomorrow.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I use Sonarworks. I got it a little over two years ago. Does it work? Absolutely. There are people who will tell you that all that EQ is messing with phase shifts etc. but I can say my mixes translated much better. I always send my mixes to a mastering engineer. I used to wrestle with the low end. Once I saw the plot of what my room was doing, it was obvious why my mixes had too much 80HZ. My room put an 8dB dip right there. Once I started using Sonarworks, the very next mix I sent out for mastering required no EQ changes. Usually, the mastering engineer would write to me and ask that I modify something. usually, pull 80HZ down on the bass and give a little more 50HZ to the kick. He rarely asks for any revisions now.
All that to say, I'm sold. It works for me. My mixer are better than ever. The only thing I don't like is their systemwide feature. Often it selects the wrong output pair (out of 24 I have available) which causes no sound. It's just annoying that it can't remember. Mostly, I use it as a plugin anyway. But when I'm doing video editing, I need the systemwide working.

Frickin' awesome. That's all I got to say about this post. Better mix translation is really my main motivation in getting this.

Yeah, agree with the above. I've had Sonarworks Reference for a few years now and mixes immediately started translating better, music sounded better through Systemwide. I declare the fundamental process "100% not bullsh*t." It does what it's supposed to.

The thing I'd warn is that Sonarworks new "SoundID" apparently is buggy and has issues on some systems. That company seems to go back and forth between completely breaking sh*t, getting things working, then breaking sh*t again. Reference 3 worked great, then Reference 4 was a complete sh*t show for a good while but they eventually got things working, and then they released the "SoundID upgrade" and that broke a lot of people's setups, including with RME cards. This is mostly with Systemwide and Windows from what I can gather. For that reason, I'm running an older version of Reference 4 that's stable on my system and haven't updated or upgraded.

[Mind Riot]

That's rough. Sonarworks was what I was originally looking at, as I had read about it before and it seemed to be the 'it' product for this sort of thing. Then I heard about ARC recently and wondered if it was kind of an inferior cheaper version, but that really isn't the impression I'm getting from people. It seems to be held as on par with Sonarworks or in some opinions better, because Sonarworks seems to have a lot of stability issues.

I'm really glad that ARC is a serious tool for the job, because aside from being cheaper the thing about Sonarworks is that they plainly state that they do not support Windows 7. Guess they had a lot of issues and eventually just gave up on it. I'm certainly not going to install a new OS for one plugin, so ARC to the rescue, and for a couple hundred bucks cheaper!

*sigh* It's just another sign that I need to update my DAW to Windows 10, though.

[Scarlet Pumpernickel]

I use Sonarworks. I got it a little over two years ago. Does it work? Absolutely. There are people who will tell you that all that EQ is messing with phase shifts etc. but I can say my mixes translated much better. I always send my mixes to a mastering engineer. I used to wrestle with the low end. Once I saw the plot of what my room was doing, it was obvious why my mixes had too much 80HZ. My room put an 8dB dip right there. Once I started using Sonarworks, the very next mix I sent out for mastering required no EQ changes. Usually, the mastering engineer would write to me and ask that I modify something. usually, pull 80HZ down on the bass and give a little more 50HZ to the kick. He rarely asks for any revisions now.
All that to say, I'm sold. It works for me. My mixer are better than ever. The only thing I don't like is their systemwide feature. Often it selects the wrong output pair (out of 24 I have available) which causes no sound. It's just annoying that it can't remember. Mostly, I use it as a plugin anyway. But when I'm doing video editing, I need the systemwide working.

Frickin' awesome. That's all I got to say about this post. Better mix translation is really my main motivation in getting this.

Yeah, agree with the above. I've had Sonarworks Reference for a few years now and mixes immediately started translating better, music sounded better through Systemwide. I declare the fundamental process "100% not bullsh*t." It does what it's supposed to.

The thing I'd warn is that Sonarworks new "SoundID" apparently is buggy and has issues on some systems. That company seems to go back and forth between completely breaking sh*t, getting things working, then breaking sh*t again. Reference 3 worked great, then Reference 4 was a complete sh*t show for a good while but they eventually got things working, and then they released the "SoundID upgrade" and that broke a lot of people's setups, including with RME cards. This is mostly with Systemwide and Windows from what I can gather. For that reason, I'm running an older version of Reference 4 that's stable on my system and haven't updated or upgraded.

For me, Reference 3 was the last stable version (of "systemwide") unfortunately.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

For me, Reference 3 was the last stable version (of "systemwide") unfortunately.

For me, 4.4.8 (which is at least one version from the latest, maybe more) works, and is where I'll be staying.

It's a shame they can't sort out the development and break things so frequently. It's likely the case that making Systemwide work with one set of interfaces breaks it with another. I don't think Windows driver/sound architecture make what they're doing especially easy.

I just wonder if things are better on Mac where CoreAudio seems to be much better at integrating pro audio cards natively than Windows.

[fese]

... It seems to be held as on par with Sonarworks or in some opinions better, because Sonarworks seems to have a lot of stability issues.

Well, to be fair, most of the stability issues people had were with the systemwide app and driver, and ARC doesn't even offer that at all but refers to third-party-solutions.

*sigh* It's just another sign that I need to update my DAW to Windows 10, though.

It's Windows 11 by now

[Mind Riot]

Well, to be fair, most of the stability issues people had were with the systemwide app and driver, and ARC doesn't even offer that at all but refers to third-party-solutions.

There are other third party solutions for acoustic correction systemwide? What are they?

It's Windows 11 by now

Son of a b%@&#!

I thought they said they didn't need to make another OS ever again. They said they could just keep updating Windows 10. What a bunch of b$#@&%"&.

Is Windows 11 another free upgrade?

[teilo]

Well, to be fair, most of the stability issues people had were with the systemwide app and driver, and ARC doesn't even offer that at all but refers to third-party-solutions.

There are other third party solutions for acoustic correction systemwide? What are they?

I use SoundSource from RogueAmoeba for this on the Mac. It lets you apply AU effects to system audio, or even to individual apps.

[J. Smith]

I've been using Reference Systemwide for some time now. There was a time when they changed the branding, and that version was unusable for some time. A couple of versions ago something was fixed though, and now it seems to be working fine on my setup.

The version I'm running currently is 5.1.2 (Build 3). I'm using it with a PreSonus Studio1824c interface.

[The Noodlist]

There are other third party solutions for acoustic correction systemwide? What are they?

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=572469&p=8251310&hi ... ent8251310

Take a room measurement with REW, make a correction IR, load this into Equaliser APO.

[Hanallred]

Thanks @teilo. I’m gonna give SoundSource from RogueAmoeba a try.

[Mind Riot]

There are other third party solutions for acoustic correction systemwide? What are they?

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=572469&p=8251310&hi ... ent8251310

Take a room measurement with REW, make a correction IR, load this into Equaliser APO.

Coooooooool. Thank you very much for sharing that. Now I've got a path forward for mixing AND systemwide. Awesome.

Thanks to everyone for their contributions. This tech is probably going to be the last piece of the puzzle that gets my mixes translating better, and I cannot even express how much time and frustration I've had trying to get around this issue.

I'm sending you all a great big e-hug right now. *squeeze*

[jamcat]

Once you did the beeps and the boops and got your frequency corrections in place, did it do what it claims to do?

Did your mixes improve?

Did your mixes translate to other audio systems better?

The car, the TV, the earbuds, the laptop speakers?

Are you still running the corrections to this day?

How long have you been using it, and do you plan to keep it permanently, or at least as long as your setup stays the way it was when you first did the beeps and boops?

Thank you all for any information you'd like to share.

Be sure to give us an update on how ARC 3 works for you when you get it all set up.

I'm also curious to know if T-RackS Mic Room is one of your 24 freebies, and if so, how the MEMS works with it in practice.