My ARC 2.5 readings are literally off the charts

[dj_shatterglass]

Hi all —

Just installed ARC 2.5 yesterday and tried to do some measurements today. The first result was horrible … turning on the ARC plugin in Logic Pro gave it the "antique radio" effect. I tried again … and it got worse. The orange curve is so wide it's literally off the screen. The thing is, the speakers sound OK to me … nowhere that bad.

Here's what I got the second time:



I'm doing something wrong but I'm not sure what. I'm in a small office, square, with a little furniture. I do all my mixing from a chair in the middle; the speakers are on a shelf pointed down toward me with those little Auralex Mopads. I took all the measurements from right around where my head would be when sitting down.

Here's my setup:

Audio out: Native Instruments Traktor 2
Power amp: Samson Servo-170
Speakers: Yorkville YM-2s (passive)
Audio input: Apogee ONE

Thanks in advance for any clues.

[dj_shatterglass]

I've repeated the ARC 2.5 measurement process about seven times and each time turns out similarly. If I play a professionally mastered commercial CD through Logic Pro, I can hear the bass being tamed a bit by the ARC 2 plugin, but the upper mids (especially when vocal, snare, and electric guitar all hit at once) are really, really harsh. What I want is a slider like MasterMatch to find a nice middle ground.

Today I set up Logic's Test Oscillator plugin to generate pink noise, set up the MEMS microphone where my ears would be, and got a flat reading:



I got similar results with a 20Hz-20kHz sine sweep.

So either my monitoring setup is very wrong or it's perfect … I was kind of hoping ARC 2.5 would settle this.

[DarkStar]

As this is primarily a user to user forum, someone-else may chime in. Meanwhile, the best thing to do is raise a Support Ticket, here:
http://www.ikmultimedia.com/contact-support/mi/
for some one to one advice (US (East Coast) Business hours, generally).

[dj_shatterglass]

Thanks, will do.

I got a nice omni mic out of the deal and qualified for the current group buy, so I'm not too upset, just curious.