SAC Plugin Latency Question

Discussions about the use and operation of SAC (Software Audio Console)

Re: SAC Plugin Latency Question

Postby IraSeigel » Wed Jun 03, 2015 9:36 am

I'm not sure either RB's previous statement or Butch's refutes what I said.

In both examples, even people trained to hear the difference, and listening carefully for the effect, sometimes can't hear a difference in small amounts of delay. And a singer using IEMs, while being able to notice very small amounts of delay, is not what I would consider your typical listener.

Yes, I agree that it's always dangerous to make a blanket statement about ANYTHING, and qualifiers should be used when doing so. The article I read years ago might have included qualifiers, but I don't recall them.

The bigger point (not "nit picking" here :) ) is that when you have a vocal mic picking up a guitar amp or a drum kit, or a violin mic picking up the French horns, you're going to get latencies between what the violin mic is picking up and what the French horn mic is picking up, and you're going to have phase distortion because of it. The only way to avoid it is to perform and record in a completely unnatural environment like an anechoic chamber. Small amounts of latency, phasing, (unwanted) reverb, etc are all things we encounter everyday and consider normal to our environment, and our brains probably need to orient ourselves in our surroundings. It would be an interesting experiment to test people in which they're subjected to NONE of those phenomena for a given period of time. Can you imagine what a person's life would be like if he or she couldn't distinguish the Doppler effect, for example? Or distinguish the latency between a signal arriving in your left ear and your right ear? Similar to seeing with only one eye, I'd imagine.
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Re: SAC Plugin Latency Question

Postby RBIngraham » Wed Jun 03, 2015 9:51 am

IraSeigel wrote:The bigger point (not "nit picking" here :) ) is that when you have a vocal mic picking up a guitar amp or a drum kit, or a violin mic picking up the French horns, you're going to get latencies between what the violin mic is picking up and what the French horn mic is picking up, and you're going to have phase distortion because of it. The only way to avoid it is to perform and record in a completely unnatural environment like an anechoic chamber. Small amounts of latency, phasing, (unwanted) reverb, etc are all things we encounter everyday and consider normal to our environment, and our brains probably need to orient ourselves in our surroundings. It would be an interesting experiment to test people in which they're subjected to NONE of those phenomena for a given period of time. Can you imagine what a person's life would be like if he or she couldn't distinguish the Doppler effect, for example? Or distinguish the latency between a signal arriving in your left ear and your right ear? Similar to seeing with only one eye, I'd imagine.


Yes true. But this is why if you know what you're doing you do your best to follow the 3 to 1 rule, which states you want to get the source of what you're trying to pick up with mic X to be at least 3 times closer to the mic than anything else that might be being picked up by another mic. In an ideal world it wouldn't just be the 3 to 1 rule in terms of distance but also the approximate SPL of the various sound sources at the mic. But of course trying to do that with keeping drums out of all the other mics is often not possible unless the stage is really large or your use plexi drum shields or something. In other words a good engineer will work with the performers to minimize these mic interactions as much as possible, there by making the phase issues it causes when all of it mixed together far less perceptible to our ear.

And yes... our brains really are amazing devices that are able to filter out a lot of random reflections and other acoustic anomalies. I know a few folks that have either completely or almost completly lost the hearing in one of their ears. They are fun to fuck with and watch them try to figure out where a sound is coming from. (when you want to be evil) :D

Doppler Effect is very different than Haas and to the best of my knowledge has nothing to do with the fact that we use two ears to hear. So I suspect even mono ear'd folk could experience that.
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RBI Computers and Audio
http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/
SAC details and goodies at: http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/SAC.html
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