[Ardour-Users] Ardour 2.8.5 released

[Ross Johnson]

Thomas Vecchione wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Ross Johnson 
> <Ross.Johnson at homemail.com.au <mailto:Ross.Johnson at homemail.com.au>> 
> wrote:
>
>     John Rigg wrote:
>
>         This kind of incident is every live sound engineer's nightmare,
>         and the reason why I keep banging on about reliability of
>         equipment.
>          
>
>     No one has yet mentioned the latency inherent in digital systems
>     for live use and particularly stage monitoring systems. Clearly
>     it's not a problem in industrial strength systems or with the
>     higher sampling rates and faster processors. Or do musicians just
>     learn to play with it?
>
>     I own an O2R that I used early in it's life for live FOH plus
>     foldback and I once had a drummer ask during sound check if I knew
>     where the delay was coming from that he was hearing/feeling as he
>     whacked his snare drum.
>
>
> Money says the delay was not from the console, which going off memory 
> the O2R should have less than 1.5mS latency, or less than the time it 
> takes sound to travel 2 feet.  In fact that is fairly standard for 
> just about any digital console, and the human ear in general, even 
> trained ears, don't hear delays <3mS, and really the vast majority of 
> people wouldn't hear <10mS.  The Haas effect describes how the human 
> ear hears multiple versions of the same sound in time for up to about 
> 40mS IIRC.
You take the money. I did leave out one SMALL detail, but I was still 
astonished at the time. There was indeed a 3ms delay on that channel 
strip from a previous session. These are extremely transient pressure 
waves so I believe the guy felt the delay more than heard it. And his 
foldback would have been right behind him within a foot or three so even 
1.5ms would double the apparent distance.