Headphone correction gets physical with IK’s neat desktop DAC.

The benefits of using EQ to flatten the response of a monitoring system are now widely accepted, and competition is hotting up. In 2024, IK Multimedia introduced ARC Studio, a hardware device that can load room correction profiles created in their ARC software. In 2025, Audient countered with the ORIA Mini, the first dedicated, standalone solution for hosting profiles created in Sonarworks’ widely used SoundID.

ARC and SoundID will both improve the in‑room response of a speaker system. SoundID is also designed to correct the frequency response of headphones, but the ORIA Mini can’t host these headphone curves. There are a handful of audio interfaces that can do so, but there’s never been a dedicated hardware counterpart to the ARC Studio or ORIA Mini targeted at headphone listening. If you sensed that you were just about to read the words “until now”, you’d be spot on, because that’s exactly what IK Multimedia’s ARC On‑Ear is.

Into The ARC

ARC On‑Ear ships in a cute and compact cubic cardboard container, and comes with a handy semi‑rigid carry case. The form factor of the unit itself recalls that of the old Focusrite VRM Box from many years ago, being a square‑ish unit about three inches across designed to sit on a desktop. It’s surprisingly heavy for its size, partly because its shell is made of metal and partly because it has a built‑in lithium‑ion battery. Audio I/O comprises a full‑sized headphone jack on the front, plus a mini‑jack labelled Analog In on the rear, where it’s joined by an on/off switch and a USB Type‑C socket. The top panel features three buttons with logos that illuminate when active, and a large volume control. This is an old‑school potentiometer rather than an encoder, and the one on the review ARC On‑Ear felt a bit wobbly.

The package includes a short USB cable and an equally short balanced audio cable with mini‑jacks at either end, one of which has a full‑sized jack adaptor screwed on. This enables two separate modes of operation. You can use the ARC On‑Ear as a USB DAC for your computer. In this scenario, your DAW software and operating system address the ARC On‑Ear directly as an output device, and there is bidirectional communication between the hardware and IK’s ARC On‑Ear software, of which more presently. Connecting the USB cable to a computer or to a suitable power source will also charge its internal battery.

This battery enables the other mode of operation, whereby the ARC On‑Ear is used as a fully standalone device. Audio is piped in through the Analog In mini‑jack socket, which is a fixed‑gain, line‑level input that can accept a maximum level of +10dBu, and the unit is controlled from the three top‑panel buttons. This might benefit any diehards still mixing in the analogue domain, and also makes it easier to integrate the ARC On‑Ear with a larger audio interface.

Both the controls and the analogue input are always operational, so as long as you have a spare USB socket, you can still have the benefits of bus powering, hardware control and software integration while supplying audio from a line out on another interface. IK say that the ARC On‑Ear will deliver around four hours’ continuous listening on a single charge, depending on various factors such as playback level. On the output side, the ARC On‑Ear uses a ‘zero impedance’ headphone amp that will deliver 100mW per channel and a maximum output level of 19dBu. I found it plenty loud enough with all the headphones I tried.

ARC Curves

Once you’ve registered the hardware and installed IK’s Product Manager, you’ll in turn be able to install the ARC Studio software. This is a friendly, mostly single‑window affair, and I found that almost everything about it was sufficiently intuitive that I didn’t need to look anything up in the PDF manual. Which is lucky, because the PDF manual doesn’t go into great depth about anything.

The ARC On‑Ear hardware can store five Presets. A Preset is configured in the ARC On‑Ear software, and is made up of several elements. First and most importantly, there’s the choice of headphone model. As this is the first headphone correction product IK have made, I was expecting to find only a handful of headphones supported. Not so. Even at launch, ARC On‑Ear includes well over 200 correction curves, for models from more than 60 manufacturers. It was enough to make me wonder whether IK had…