Delay setting

[Jimmy]

I had a question about the Relative Delay setting (2.5 on menu).

If I want to make an adjustment to put my center speaker one foot further away from my listening area, do I set the Relative Delay for -1.0ms or 1.0ms? The manual is not on this.

Thanks.

[Burke Strickland]

From the "Instruction Manual"

b. Relative Delay
Besides level and delay adjustments, the RDC-7
provides the ability to change or adjust the relative speaker position to fine tune the soundfield for the listener. This is accomplished using Integra’s unique Enhanced Spatial Positioning Algorithm. This adjustment provides 10 milliseconds of delay for the speakers, which is equivalent to moving the speaker 10 feet away. This adjustment is set up to provide -4 or +6 milliseconds (-4 or +6 feet) of adjustment to the
listener’s position. Once the coarse adjustments-speaker level and dis-tance adjustments-are made, the system is set up to provide a typical or broad surround environment. By adjusting the relative position of the speakers, we are able to alter the soundfield to be more spread out
(deeper) or focused (shallower).

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The way I read this, if you want the speaker to sound as if it is relatively one foot closer, the setting would be -1, while for one foot farther away it would be set at +1. But it would have been nice if they had given us a clearly worded example illustrating the point so we'd know for sure! :>)

Burke

[dschamis]

I could be wrong, but I thought that this was only for times when the video and audio were out of sync - I think the relative difference of having a speaker a few feet closer would be unmeasurable (ie speed of sound), although I could be wrong about this.

David

[Burke Strickland]

a. A/V Sync
If a digital signal processor is connected, there may be times when the audio and video from a DVD or LD player is not output in perfect sync. The result is where the sound and picture do not match and the sound is heard too early. In such a case, use this setting to prop-erly synchronize the audio and video. This setting can be set between 0 to 30 ms in 0.5-ms increments. Under normal circumstances, this can left at 0 ms. For input sources using the multi channel port, this setting will not appear.

David - I may be misreading these two "Delay" setup menu options (the "b" Relative Delay option cited in my previous post, and the "a" A/V Sync option quoted above) but I think "A/V Sync" is the one for the situation you describe, while "Relative Delay" is intended to compensate for non-optimal speaker placement like a center channel speaker having to be a couple of feet forward of the mains due to the room arrangement. I believe the idea is to compensate for the effect of off-kilter arrival times of sound from speakers which reputedly can degrade the sound stage if off by even a couple of milliseconds (or less).

I'm not an audio/acoustic engineer, so I don't really know the scientific rationale behind that. My previous pre/pro had a feature like "Relative Delay" to supposedly compensate for the center channel being at a different distance from the listening position than the mains, but I didn't notice any difference in the sound regardless of the setting. You've motivated me to try it with the RDC-7 to see if the "Relative Delay" feature does anything for me now. (The front of my center speaker is, in fact, a couple of feet forward of the plane of the L/R mains.) I'll get back with those results later!

Burke