How to guide: Setting the delay between the left and right speakers.

[completeluxury]

my left tweeter on my speakers is broken (a tape measure got too close to the magnet and SQUISH) so i cant do any real life testing of how it sounds once finished so i hope someone in here has a crack at this!

[completeluxury]

Guide has been re-done on first post!!

[thumb5]

So i pull out the devialet card for my left amp, input a 100us delay on the sub pre-out, speaker pre-out enabled and pre-out disabled.
...
From here i pulled the slave card out and changed the delay from 100us to 90us and the next photo is the result
...
So if i set the delay to 85ms it was the left channel a little bit behind, set to 90 is the right channel thats a bit behind... i was trying to set the figure to 86, 87, 88 etc but it reverts to either 85 or 90 as soon as you click ok.

I assume when you say 85 ms in the last paragraph you mean 85 us (microseconds) - right?

If that is the figure you ended up with to get the impulse traces to coincide, by my maths that corresponds to a distance of just under 3 cm.  My guess is that that could be due to asymmetry in the distance between the microphone and each speaker.  It's probably quite hard to get much better accuracy than that, I would think.  In any case it's much smaller than likely variations due your head changing position while listening...

[completeluxury]

Thanks for the find thumb5 i changed that mistake. you gave me a great idea that i just didnt think of though - now the speakers can be adjusted by mere cms to get a perfect response

i get the feeling the delay is half speaker positioning and half some kind of electronic delay.

[krass]

Thanks for the find thumb5 i changed that mistake. you gave me a great idea that i just didnt think of though - now the speakers can be adjusted by mere cms to get a perfect response

i get the feeling the delay is half speaker positioning and half some kind of electronic delay.

I think the point is that the exercise in adjusting time delays will not help unless you can:
a) put your head/ both ears in the exact same position +\- 3 cms
b) keep it/ lock it there whilst you listen

in which case would this really be an 'improvement' ?!!

[completeluxury]

i think thats a really silly thing to say krass.

its not about having that cancellation happen while you are listening to music. its about having your listening position be exact centre which it wont be unless you do something like this.

it might be close, but it wont be perfect. what we do day in day out with our systems is add components or change cables to see what makes music sound better to us. having your left and right channels perfectly aligned WILL be an improvement. it might not be as glamorous as changing parts or putting in a fancy cable but no mod you make will have this affect on your system.

People always want a better sound stage and this is about the basic starting point - central imaging.

[f1eng]

i think thats a really silly thing to say krass.

its not about having that cancellation happen while you are listening to music. its about having your listening position be exact centre which it wont be unless you do something like this.

it might be close, but it wont be perfect. what we do day in day out with our systems is add components or change cables to see what makes music sound better to us. having your left and right channels perfectly aligned WILL be an improvement. it might not be as glamorous as changing parts or putting in a fancy cable but no mod you make will have this affect on your system.

People always want a better sound stage and this is about the basic starting point - central imaging.

Well I think you are inventing a non existent problem to solve. Krass is quite right.
My recommendation to everybody would be to stop dicking about endlessly with your hifi and use it to listen to music with, but that is just me.

[thumb5]

My recommendation to everybody would be to stop dicking about endlessly with your hifi and use it to listen to music with, but that is just me.

Exactly.  That's what all the people not posting on the forum are doing, of course

[completeluxury]

i think thats a really silly thing to say krass.

its not about having that cancellation happen while you are listening to music. its about having your listening position be exact centre which it wont be unless you do something like this.

it might be close, but it wont be perfect. what we do day in day out with our systems is add components or change cables to see what makes music sound better to us. having your left and right channels perfectly aligned WILL be an improvement. it might not be as glamorous as changing parts or putting in a fancy cable but no mod you make will have this affect on your system.

People always want a better sound stage and this is about the basic starting point - central imaging.

Well I think you are inventing a non existent problem to solve. Krass is quite right.
My recommendation to everybody would be to stop dicking about endlessly with your hifi and use it to listen to music with, but that is just me.

i didnt create any problems. we were recently given the option in the configurator to install delays to channels. this guide tells you how you can use those delays. perhaps you should call devialet and tell them they are putting obsolete functions into their software and people should just listen to the music.

its possible to both listen to music and spend some time on this side of the fence. if you and krass dont want to work with delays to get your speakers perfectly aligned - dont. for most of the people here, half the fun is dicking around with the system.

i have been asked by at least 2 members of the forum about getting a guide done and so i have done.

[krass]

no need for any disagreement here, it's useful (for everybody) to understand how to change the relative delay so what you've done has good general value and can certainly help others. That's the 1st piece of very useful info in this thread that others can use.

I think its still worth recognizing that there is a 2nd piece of useful info, that there is probably a limit as to how far it is useful to go, and what the controlling factors are (such as head movements or speaker repositioning etc). The 2nd piece of useful information is the calculation made by thumb5:-
340m/s == 34cm/ms == 0.034cm/us
So a delay of about 100us is about 3.4 cm, as thumb5 calculated already

Everybody can make their own decision on what to do with these bits of info. IMHO chasing a few centimeters seems unecessary, but it's just my opinion based on an engineering assessment.I think it's worth sharing that so that others benefit from realizing the magnitude of the time delay vs distance relationship - it may help them to make a better informed choice about a sensible level of time delay accuracy and what it means in terms of requirements and comfort to have rather fixed positioning (move 3cm and the entire delay is negated !)

good luck further......