Question for Ethan.

[Jeffguitar]

Hi ethan.

Can you tell me if you had lets say, a string patch on a keyboard, split to two separate tracls, paned left and right, recorded at the same time, could you hear any smear or latency issues if you moved one track forward 1 or 2 milliseconds? Can a human hear a shift of 2 miliseconds when a track is shifted by that much? Could it interfere with classical music wher you would feel a phase shift or something?

[tINY]

Are you familiar with A-B stereo recording? The varying delay is a big part of what gives you a sense of space.

Taking a mono track and delaying it differently L/R isn't the same, though. If you modulate that delay, you get a stereo chorus....





-tINY

[Jeffguitar]

What do you mean? Why would you say that? I am having a discussion on another forum about the Zoom r16 having 2 millisecond recording latency and if that is actually something that could cause you problems that you could actually hear or not.

Originally Posted by Sounds Great

If you were any more transparent you'd be cellophane.

[SAC]

The superposition of the two identical signals results in constructive and destructive interference called comb filtering.

In the period between >0 and ~20+ ms, you are in the 'Haas interval' - where the limits of the ear-brain cannot separate close arriving signals into separate discreet events, and 'time smear' distortion (per Heyser) results.

The result is a degradation in intelligibility and imaging.
Hence the value of calibrated microsecond delay.

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by Jeffguitar

if you had lets say, a string patch on a keyboard, split to two separate tracls, paned left and right, recorded at the same time, could you hear any smear or latency issues if you moved one track forward 1 or 2 milliseconds? Can a human hear a shift of 2 miliseconds when a track is shifted by that much? Could it interfere with classical music wher you would feel a phase shift or something?

If two sound sources are the same, panned hard left and right, you can easily hear if one version is delayed. The sound will seem to come from the speaker that plays the earlier version. This is very easy to test, so I suggest you try it.

BTW, this has nothing to do with record latency which affects all channels equally. No recorder would delay one channel relative to the other!

--Ethan

[tINY]

I seem to remember there was a low-budget converter that used an interlacing scheme and a single converter... So, the L/R was off by about 23 micro seconds.

This may make a slight difference, but it corresponds to less than 1/3 of an inch of distance in speaker placement.



-tINY

[Ethan Winer]

Wow, that's lame. How along ago was that though? At least 20 years ago I hope!

--Ethan

[tINY]

Actually less than 10 years.

Converers have gotten better and less expensive quickly in the last 5-7 years.




-tINY