Creating Axe-fx compatible IRs from IK multimedia ARC2

JJunkie

Power User
Hi guys

I'd like to get back into home recording, but my new room is not ideal - bad shape (semi circle), walls have mostly windows and glass doors, so its not possible to put in corner traps. I have auralex panels in the places that aren't taken u by windows and they are doing a good job of taming the reflections, but I still feel that the frequency balance in the room is out of control.

I create my patches in front of the desk and when I move to the lounge chair, everything sounds wrong - of course this is to be expected when moving away and off centre from my nearfield monitors (Dynaudio BM5as), but even just standing up from my normal position gives poor results.

I don't have any appropriate gear at home for making room measurements, so I have had my eye on ARC2 for a while.

I also have Ozone 5 and I have previously made my own IR wav files from match EQ. I was hoping that in creating an IR wav in my DAW, capturing profiles from ARC2, that I could convert these wavs into Axe-FX II compatible .syx and (omg..) .IR files? It would be super awesome to use cab lab to bake-in some room correction into my favorite IRs for home use.

Cheers!
 
Give Sonarworks a look, too. That's what I use. Any room-correction software doesn't replace a treated room, but it does help.
I had a look at sonarworks but it looks outside of my budget because i dont have access to a reference mic. Trying to convince Mrs Clause to get me this and she is making noises but they are not exactly 'ho ho ho'
 
Give Sonarworks a look, too. That's what I use. Any room-correction software doesn't replace a treated room, but it does help.

Ahh. when i was reading about the plugin it seemed to suggest to byo mic but looking at the store they sell the mic with a software trial that looks pretty reasonable. Thanks for the suggestion!
 
Ahh. when i was reading about the plugin it seemed to suggest to byo mic but looking at the store they sell the mic with a software trial that looks pretty reasonable. Thanks for the suggestion!
Yes. What I did was wait for AudioDeluxe to have a sale on Sonarworks Reference 3 Speaker Calibration software and bought it from them. Then, I bought the XREF 20 mic directly from Sonarworks' website when they were offering it for $49 and free shipping. I caught a killer deal. If you can wait, usually the best deals can be had on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and pretty much the whole month of December.
 
Could you use an AFX tone match to do the same thing? At least for one position? If you shoot your room form the listening position, like shooting a cab IR, then use that as 'source' for a tone match, and use a copy of the DIRECT cab IR sweep as the 'target', would that get you a quick and dirty room correction? You could bake that into your preset and output that, even while sending the unbaked signal to DAW or house on a different AFX output.

Just thinking out load, but with a little sweeping during sound check, you could conceivably remove 'the room' from a point on a small stage in a bad room.

Anyway i have ARC2 and it works like a charm. I have a good monitoring space and i notice the imaging is better, clarity better, response better, and the very slight boxiness of the monitors is removed at the same time, and the area where the correction applies can be any size and shape in a room, or the whole room. It combines up to 16 points to determine correction - not sure how they combine them but may be simple averaging. Not sure if averaging a number of 'cab shoots' of the listening room in Cab Lab would be equivalent or not..
 
Why not just sit in the mix position and play the Fractal through your DAW with the Arc2 plugin on?
That's probably easier and more accurate than trying to shoot IR's, like @BillyZeppa was suggesting.

The cool thing with Sonarworks is that you don't have to even open your DAW to use it. They have a video explaining how to do it. It's a little cumbersome, but I was told by someone at Sonarworks that they're working on an easy standalone version.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions guys! After looking into it more I think that live monitoring through the daw for jamming and media listening makes the most sense. I did try the workaround solution described by sonarworks but found it was unnecessary if you already have a daw and a decent interface.
 
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