Proper use of the Haas effect in mixing...

Just to clarify after a bit more thinking while driving down the highway tonight (good place to think , hey).
Panning a track to hard left is just subtracting it from the right. Panning an exact copy of the track to hard right is just replacing what you took away when you panned it hard left. It becomes centred again and you gain nothing. Maybe I'm simple but that's what I see as happening.

Cheers, Tim.
 
would this be something used on a background sound to bring it forward, or a forward background sound that i don't want to turn down but just haas it?

would it be a neat idea to do a bounce of say...your string section...and delay one channel slightly?
 
cello_pudding said:
would this be something used on a background sound to bring it forward, or a forward background sound that i don't want to turn down but just haas it?

would it be a neat idea to do a bounce of say...your string section...and delay one channel slightly?


It really depends on how you use it. The only real way to figure it out is to experiment with it. Spend time working with it. You'll figure out how you want to use it.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
"Also the delay time for Haas is between 10 to 40 millisecond. Times less than that are percseived as phase shift, times more than that are perceived as delay."
Not sure where those numbers come from. You might be confusing them with that gereral range where anything from >1 to about 20 or 30 is heard as a smear' on the original (?) but that would be in a mono setting..

Ok, this is what I get. Review time, plus some stuff I didn't notice before..
Panning starts right off down around three or four tenths of a millisecond. It's about as far 'left as you're going to get by about 2ms.
This is cool- On a mono (of course) kit mic track, at above 3 or 4 ms up to around 10 the 'kit image still plays' from the left -all the attacks, presence, but the late side starts to sound like it has the back end of the envelopes, similar to what you might get on a panned compressed room track. 6' and up, it's definitely sounding more like pan with a stereo width effect. But totally cool as I would have never thought that and would have always gone for 20-40+ for that 'effect.

The same thing on a vocal though- No go. Pans at 2' ok, but mostly just sloppy image in the higher range.

Bass bleed on the kit track- Kool Stupid Pet Trick- Stays center and reinforced through bother speakers -as apposed to a 'one-speaker' hard pan.
Bass D/I solo- Same trick, the bright edge' pans well but the bottom hangs in there in both speakers.

Down sides- The delay-pan doesn't hold up well at all as you shift listening position towards the delayed side. -No better than a volume pan at 75%. -Phasier' than volume pan as you pass from L-R in front of the speakers. -Any other short stereo reflections on the track- kills it dead.
Dinner time. :D
 
cello_pudding said:
would this be something used on a background sound to bring it forward, or a forward background sound that i don't want to turn down but just haas it?

would it be a neat idea to do a bounce of say...your string section...and delay one channel slightly?
In this application I think you'll see front/back effects when you go for 10+ ms in stereo (with width added also) or up in the 'slap back/echo' ranges (out past the 'Haas effect) in mono or stereo. (Rough numbers.. :)
 
Tim Gillett said:
I guess you can do a combination effect of giving the left channel time precedence (Haas) but lower its level compared to the right, sort of fooling the ear into thinking its closer because of Haas but further away because the level's lower, but I havent tried it myself. I'm not sure the brain will handle that effect too comfortably for too long because it's contradictory information in terms of our normal acoustic reality.

I tried this. To me, it sounded like the haas effect was stronger than the conventional panning, keeping the sound at pretty much the same spot even when increasing the gain on the opposite channel, until a certain point, when the image suddenly seemed to shift/jump to the other side. It still doesn't sound the same as only Haas, or only conventional panning though. Try it, it's fun.
 
mixsit said:
"Also the delay time for Haas is between 10 to 40 millisecond. Times less than that are percseived as phase shift, times more than that are perceived as delay."
Not sure where those numbers come from. You might be confusing them with that gereral range where anything from >1 to about 20 or 30 is heard as a smear' on the original (?) but that would be in a mono setting..
The numbers are dependent on the listener, so I don't believe there is a hard and fast rule.

Those numbers came from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haas_effect .

Answers.com uses to 1 to 30ms:
http://www.answers.com/topic/haas-effect

My vague memory from Modern Recording Techniques (Huber) seemed to back up Wikipedia, which is why I used those.
 
Halion said:
I tried this. To me, it sounded like the haas effect was stronger than the conventional panning, keeping the sound at pretty much the same spot even when increasing the gain on the opposite channel, until a certain point, when the image suddenly seemed to shift/jump to the other side. It still doesn't sound the same as only Haas, or only conventional panning though. Try it, it's fun.


That is pretty typical. Most people's ears use TIME information more than VOLUME information when placing a sound, so a sound has to be significantly louder to be perceived as the source if it is happening latter.

Actually, this is absolutely essential to many modern sound reenforcement systems. For instance, the theater I worked in at Berklee (the Berklee Performance Center) had four sets of speakers; the left and right mains, the front fills, the under-balcony fills, and the subs. Everything was delayed compared to the mains (which were themselves delayed a bit because the house sound guy wanted you to perceive the stage as the "source"). The mains couldn't really fill the room evenly (they never can). They were great for the balcony and most of the front section of the floor, but in the very front there would be a little gap if you just relied on the mains; so, we had front fills. They were (from memory) about 30 feet from the mains, so they had about a 30ms delay on them (sound travels at about a foot per ms, or is that meters? I can never remember, but then that's why I use SIA Smaart to measure all my delay times). The mains were also pretty near useless under the balcony, so down there we had a set of small fill speakers as well. They were about 100 or so feet from the mains, and there for were delayed about 100ms. The subs, when I first got there, were NOT delayed because (as we all know) humans can not perceive the direction of very low frequencies. The thing is, it was always kind of muddy down there, so we tried delaying them (about 35ms for the 35 feet from the mains), and all of a sudden the low end in that room tightened up like mad. The idea is for everything to arrive at your ears at the same time. Electricity traveling, as it does, much faster than sound, if you have all of the speakers making the same sound at the same time, it becomes muddy and different people hear the sound from different sources. It is just another application of the same basic concept, i.e. tricking your ears by playing with the arrival time of various sound sources.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
masteringhouse said:
The numbers are dependent on the listener, so I don't believe there is a hard and fast rule.

Those numbers came from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haas_effect .

Answers.com uses to 1 to 30ms:
http://www.answers.com/topic/haas-effect

My vague memory from Modern Recording Techniques (Huber) seemed to back up Wikipedia, which is why I used those.


I got to go with Answer.com on this one. Try that experiment I mentioned. You will start to notice the difference as soon as you start to add delay.


Oh, I almost forgot one of the other really cool things about delay panning; it is much more precise about WHERE things are placed. Most people can only hear 3 locations with pure amplitude panning (left, center, right), with most engineers hearing 5 (left, center-left, center, center-right, and right). Some people with extremely good hearing can get 7 locations. With delay panning (or Haas effect panning), you can get a nearly infinate spread, and MOST of your audience will be able to hear it. WAY past Cool!!!!


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I wanna hear some sound clips of this because I don't think I'm doing it right...
 
Light said:
Everything was delayed compared to the mains (which were themselves delayed a bit because the house sound guy wanted you to perceive the stage as the "source").
That is absolutely brilliant!
 
NYMorningstar said:
That is absolutely brilliant!


Well, it didn't really work with loud rock or pop acts, but with quieter jazz acts and folk stuff, it was great. And Brad (the lead sound guy in that theater) was a BIG believer in having the sound system be as transparent as possible. If you sounded good on your own, he was your best friend, but if you sounded like shit - well, he would rarely go out of his way to help you sound better. Not that he couldn't (he's been doing sound for as long as most of the students there had been alive...he knew it all), but unless you asked him for something specific, he wouldn't do it.

But I learned a fuck of a lot about making systems transparent from him, which was way past cool.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
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