Anthem Room Correction
To appreciate room correction, we would like to first explain to you why it is so important. If you ask any recording engineer what affects the sound more than anything else, they will tell you it is room! Sound propagates from your speakers much like a pebble hitting a pool of water. The sound waves bounce off the walls and they bounce around differently based upon the actual frequency of the sound. This means some frequencies get built up at some locations in your room and canceled out in other places. Also, materials in the room affect this as well. Some rooms are more prone to big dips and peaks than others. The worst sounding room would be a glass cube as it would be super reflective and a cube which is the worst for odd build-ups and dips of frequencies.
Decades ago, people tried to correct room issues through equalizers. These allowed you to boost or cut a certain frequency. However, this was very unscientific without a pile of test gear and usually resulted in the sound quality going down.
Early, automated forms of room correction did not have the processing power to get everything right and caused big phase issues.
As software and horsepower for processing progressed, room correction finally was able to make things a lot better for most rooms.
Anthem, being in Canada, gets to benefit from using the National Research Center in Canada. This is a government-funded lab designed to help tech companies based in Canada. This facility has some of the best audio test equipment in the world and makes use of blind listening tests with average people off the street to confirm their findings.
Anthem Room Correction or ARC came out of research at the NRC and is one of our favorite ones on the market. The difference it can make in most systems is just stunning. After you run ARC on your system you will notice the dialog is much clearer and it is easier to pick up the subtle emotional details in the performers' voices. Bass is much tighter and more accurate. Plus every sound is much more separated from the others pulling you even closer to the soundtrack.
About a year ago, Anthem had a big free update to ARC and it is now called ARC Genesis. This year, ARC Genesis has been improved to allow you to send a full-range signal to your main speakers and subwoofer at the same time (only if you want to), but to us, the big deal is an upgrade to the microphone.
Every Anthem receiver comes with an ARC kit that includes a microphone, stand for the microphone, and connecting cables. We can tell you from experience with other room correction systems, the quality of the microphone can make a huge difference in the final outcome. Anthem worked with the NRC to completely redesign the microphone and ARC will work even better now to improve the sound of your room. The mic now even has a small dot you point towards the front of the room so the system knows how to pick up spatial information from the test tones.