Hi, I'm David Lee from BASSBOSS and often delayed.

But delay can be a useful thing.

To start off with when we've got BASSBOSS systems set up, kind of like they are behind me here where the cabinets are effectively aligned with each other physically, there's no need to use delay. All the cabinets have all the necessary processing to operate coherently.

When you start physically separating the boxes by distances of more than three feet is when delay starts to become necessary. When you think about delay, it's always going to give you a single point at which you have ideal summation of two speakers that are not co-located. In other words, and you can delay to a certain spot, but not everywhere. So the best thing you can do is to co-locate speakers as much as possible so that you don't have to delay due delays on them.

You may have a speaker on the outside of a 100-foot room that needs to cover a patio and the sounds coming out the door. And if you didn't delay it, it would be a train wreck. So you need delay.

You may have a situation where your subs are center stage and your tops are way off in the left and right, and they really aren't working well at all. For whatever reason, you may need to delay the sounds. There's other things.

You have an array of subwoofers that you're trying to expand the coverage of, so you have to do progressive delay. There's other ways to do that, actually, other than just delay. But that's a one that's more readily accessible and fairly easy to implement.

When you have a distance that's greater than one quarter wavelength at that transition frequency between, you know, how close one element is from the other, depending on which one, it doesn't really matter. You have to always delay the one that's closer because unfortunately, we can't go backwards in time. So you're moving the closer one further away.

So when you have something like a speaker on a patio that's 30, 40, 50 feet away, you will run that signal through a delay and delay it. How?

Okay, if you don't have measurement gear, then you can do relatively simple math. You want to button clearly. I mean, when I say measurement gear, I mean microphones and computers and stuff like that. Other measurement gear would be a tape measure or a laser measure, but you can do it with your feet and pace it out.

Whatever kit, close the normal sort of ballpark range of what you want to do for delay is speed of sound is roughly 1,125 feet per second varies with temperature, altitude, such like. But if you do the math on 1,125, you're going to be close enough and you can do a little bit more.

So you figure out how far you've got in feet for this calculation. In meters, it's 343 meters per second. So if you do it in feet, it's 1125. So 1.1125 feet per millisecond. So 0.8889 milliseconds per foot. I think I got that right.

So if you figure out how far you can multiply by 0.8889 and get how many milliseconds you need to delay, and then for an effect, it's called the Precedence Effect, you can put an extra 10 milliseconds on there. If you look at it really long distances, it doesn't really work. But, you know, if you've got 1.1125 every eight feet, you're getting another millisecond.

So you could be close by just doing it in feet per millisecond because you do want a little bit more delay, because what happens if you do have a little bit more delay is that when somebody is near to that second speaker, the one that they are closer to, that the system is far away from. You don't want them to hear that speaker first and then the main system, you want them to hear the arrival of the main system first and then have it reinforced by the closer speaker.

Our brains locate sound based on the first arrival so that the first arrival is coming from the main system. Even if the fill speaker is above their head to the right, they will still recognize this source as being whatever that is. The stage, the boost, whatever.

As an example of this, I've had several occasions where somebody, you know, got my attention, said that speaker's not working and I like that speaker, that speaker's working. In occasions when I can actually do this, I'll go hang on and I'll turn off the main speakers and I'll be like, Whoa, okay. That's working. How come I couldn't hear it?

You could. It's just that your brain was telling you the sound was coming from the main source over there by the podium, by the stage, whatever, because that's what we wanted it to do. So that's why you want to add just a little bit more than the distance.

Now, I will say that we are going to assume that the latency, the throughput latency to the main system and the delayed system are the same so that you can just do the math from one speaker of the main array to the delayed speaker. Whether it's ten feet, there are 100 feet. The math is effectively the same.

It gets a little complicated when you're mixing subs and tops because when you're delaying subs versus tops, you've got them operating in different frequencies. And it's critical that they sum coherently at the frequencies at which they're both producing energy. If one's early and the other one's late, they'll cancel at that transition frequency. So you have to watch out for that.

And it's again, it's a problem because your listening point, your measuring point is a single point. But anywhere else further away, closer into the left, to the right, higher up, that lower down is going to have a different relative distance between the two sources.

So, you got to be careful about where you center, where you measure, where you reference to. You want that to be a relevant place. That's not too close because then it'll be all further away where there's a greater number of audience members and you don't need it to be too far either because so you've got to judge where the most practical place to have best impact is and align to that point.

There will be compromises closer, there will be compromises further away. So, life is full of compromises and oftentimes we're too late.

Enjoy.