The ARC System helps you address one of the most critical factors influencing the quality of a music production -- the accuracy of the monitoring system. In fact, the combination of speakers and room acoustics prove to be the weakest link in the music production chain. When monitors are placed in a room, the surrounding walls, ceiling, furniture and other objects reflect and absorb their sounds; creating complex distortions specific to the room -- causing them to lose the accuracy they have been designed for and you end up hearing more of the sound of the room than the music actually being produced.
The ARC System delivers the most advanced solution to acoustical problems for any DAW-based studio. By combining a professionally calibrated microphone, standalone software that captures sound information and calculates proper roomer corection, and a multi-platform plug-in, ARC features the revolutionary Audyssey MultEQ® technology, which measures acoustical information throughout the listening area in your studio. It then combines this information to provide an accurate representation of the room’s acoustical problems. The equalization solution then corrects for both time and frequency response problems more effectively and efficiently than any other room correction EQ on the market. The result is a clear and reliable representation of your mix. Regardless of the acoustical issues in your studio, what you are recording, mixing or mastering becomes immediately clear and reliable and your studio sound will improve forever.
The ARC System works with Mac and PC. It comes with room measurement software and a VST, RTAS, AU correction plug-in that is compatible with most DAWs (Pro Tools®, Cubase™, Logic™, Sonar™, Live™, etc.)
Professional measurement microphone
- Type: 1/4" precision measurement condenser microphone
- Polar pattern: omni-directional, free field
- Capsule frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000 kHz +/- 5dB
- Calibrated frequency response when used with ARC: 20 Hz – 20,000 kHz, +/- 2 dB
- Output: transformerless, electronically balanced, 200 ohms output impedance
- Sensitivity 50 mV/Pa
- Noise Equivalent Level: 22 dB
- Max SPL: 130 dB for 3% THD
- Automatic multi-point room measurement system, wizard based, based on Audyssey MultEQ® technology
- Measurement precision when used with ARC System microphone: +/- 1.5 dB
- Requires 48 kHz operation (only for measurements)
- Requires ASIO Audio Hardware on Windows or XP, CoreAudio on Mac OS X
- Saves Measurement sets to be opened on the ARC System Correction Plug-In
- Multi platform high quality Frequency AND Time correction processor based on Audyssey MultEQ® technology
- Correction precision when used with ARC System microphone: +/- 1.5 dB
- Correction processor resolution: 32 bits floating point
- Correction processor supported sampling rates: 32 kHz to 96 kHz
- Four target curves
- Graphic Frequency response display
ARC System
Full Price $699
Crossgrade Price $499
(For existing registered IK Multimedia product owners)
For more information
IK Multimedia ARC System
Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if you’re not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an “intelligent pitch-changer” that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ’80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. It’s essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is ±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and it’s also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the device’s guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days it’s not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000’s capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymon’s “shimmer” effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what you’ve won!)
“If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.”
But there’s another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. It’s easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which they’re mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isn’t always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offer—and I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, that’s a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions don’t quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) It’s all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists won’t be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations exist—Eventide’s own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhere—and you’ve got the time—fire it up, wait for the distinctive “click” of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
