Also keep in mind that the numbers you are stating might not include other processing inline, for instance digital pedals these days can add a bit of latency, or wireless setups, etc. All that adds up.
Seablade
Right on with everything you said @seablade. I don’t consider myself WELL trained, nor professional, and I’m fine with a 11.6ms round-trip latency. Double that, and I can’t do it…I just can’t “lock in”. It’s too distracting, and if I try to force myself, the “drift” is horrible. I definitely notice it. I think 11.6ms is probably my threshold. Less would be better, in theory, but not sure my ears would even notice. I would require a LOT more training and experience to hear latency at 11.6ms. Your info certainly tracks, and reaffirms, my observations. Appreciate the info, as I didn’t know! And it’s nice to know I’m not as “unusual” as I’ve been told. LOL!
I bet all of those drummers played with James Brown.
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It’s also important to notice that singers can be affected by latency longer than 5-10 milliseconds. Singing while monitoring your voice on the headphones can be very disturbing because your bones and head will interfere with the headphone’s sound while you are singing.
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I have also heard it said that latency caused by sound traveling through air can be perceived differently than latency caused by delay in electronic signal paths.
Apparently this is because sound traveling through air is subject to acoustic effects like reflections, absorption, and so on which the brain interprets as “far away”, whilst a pure delay due to signal latency doesn’t have those audio cues, especially not when playing through headphones and, as such, sounds unnatural and “disconnected”.
I don’t know if there’s any truth to this, but given how our ears and brains deal with sound, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was.
It sometimes makes me wonder if there’s an opportunity to apply some acoustic effects to make the latency sound more natural.
Then I remember Boss has their Waza Air headphones which apply ambient effects to make it sound like you are “in the room” with an amp/cabinet. Although in that case it’s not to hide latency, as the Boss stuff is renowned for being very low latency ( I believe the latency of their recent modelling stuff is around the 1ms mark).
Cheers,
Keith
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This has more to do with mixing signals in air with latency vs electronically. Ie. Timing out sound systems, or phase cancellation from multiple mics. There are multiple reasons for this, but the short version is you get more cancellation when mixing the signals electronically than if they mix acoustically, so it sounds better mixing acoustically. This is the basis for things like A/B system designs in theater, where you might have two speakers side by side covering the same area, but with different mics in them so that you can put a lover’s duet mics (Which OFTEN cause phase cancellation due to timing differences for the different voices) into one speaker each and have the latent signals mix acoustically, sounding much more natural to us, than mixing them in a mixing console and sneding them out a single speaker.
This is an entire lecture in system design here so I am giving VERY broad strokes above for the record.
Seablade
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I also think it depends on the instrument. I suspect percussive instruments are more susceptible to delay than, say, bowed string instruments.
A lot of guitars players say they can detect latencies in a similar range although it doesn’t affect them as badly as with singers. In this case, it’s said to be more in terms of a difference in “feel” rather than anything else.
This is a particular case where, especially for electric guitar players, there is the argument that the latency caused by (for example) a digital multifx unit shouldn’t be any different from standing a few feet further from the amplifier. Yet it does seem to be perceived differently.
And multifx which have low latency, are often described by guitar players as more natural feeling and responsive. I think most modern units are well under 5ms these days, but the cumulative latency is important if you are chaining systems (such as digital mixers, wireless systems, and IEMs). As mentioned, the recent Boss stuff, like the GX-10, have extremely low latency (under 1ms).
Cheers,
Keith
Hmmm, I must be slow tonight. Even if the lovers both sing in the same vocal range, and are scored to sing the same notes at the same time (who would actually do that in a duet?) the differences in vocal timbre and timing should mitigate any possible phase cancellation. What am I missing?
Because the phase cancellation isn’t from each other’s voices, it is from their same voice being picked up in both mics (Thus the timing/latency playing into things which brought it into the thread). When I refer to the lover’s duet in theater I am typically referring to two characters that end up singing in at least part of the song face to face, typically a foot or so apart, but sometimes even closer.
In theater the typical mount for an omni-directional mic is on the forehead about 8 in from the mouth, so a foot of difference vs 8 in of difference means that you get similar signals, and if they are holding each other in an embrace while singing it only gets worse, especially when you realize that typically the female lead’s mic will end up right in front of the male leads mouth in a lot of cases, so you actually pick him up louder there than in his own mic or the female lead voice in her mic, all sorts of topics on mixing technique here to be had, but the short version of all this is that you get significant phase cancellation of both of their voices, because they are both being picked up in both mics at different timings.
Hope that helped, if we want to go further down this rabbit hole we should make a new thread and I can explain a bit more in depth (Though I am flying out to deal with something and might be delayed in responding over the next week).
Seablade
It may be worth splitting some of this latency talk into a separate thread anyway, as it’s drifted away from the original topic quite a bit.
Cheers,
Keith
Thanks, @seablade for the clarification. I did a bunch of theatre donkey’s years ago in high school and college, but none of it was ever close mic’ed (the only mics I can recall were for recording, not FoH), so that source of phasing never even occurred to me.
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