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Post by jamesgasson on May 18, 2020 22:09:22 GMT
Hello audio chums! I'm interested in building a device that would be incredibly useful but which doesn't seem to be readily available anywhere. I wonder if anyone may be able to help? I have very little electronics knowledge so I'd be grateful first of all for any guidance on how realistic I'm being...
I require a signal delay device that can get down to the microsecond range, for the purpose of phase aligning microphones. There are a few devices on the market which will allow you to delay a signal to the ms, but none that go down to μs. Ideally I'd love something that would allow both; say with one dial for ms and another for μs.
This doesn't seem like a big ask, but I'm finding such a device shockingly unavailable. Does anyone have any thoughts?
Thank you all!
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Post by rock on May 19, 2020 3:21:27 GMT
The most likely reason you can't find a device in the microsecond range is that most audio delay devices are digital. There is a finite delay in processing analog into digital and I would suggest that the processing delay is the limiting factor for how short of a delay you can achieve. That's not to say it's not possible to go faster with the fastest converters or even new designs with emerging or future technologies but without a substantial market demand, there would be no incentive to produce such a device. There is/was an analog delay line that I recall being used in old CRT NTSC type color TVs, but IIRC, it was fixed time delay(I don't know/remember how long) for aligning video signals not audio so I think it was not necessarily for audio... but who knows. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_delay_line www.arrow.com/en/categories/clock-and-timing/delay-lines www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article/21801240/an-accurate-analog-delay-circuitIf you want to design and build electronics, you can educate yourself and design your analog microsecond delay line. Don't take my response as the final word. Keep searching!
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Post by Hexspa on May 19, 2020 8:43:15 GMT
There are alignment plugins like MAutoAlign which might help. Not sure about their resolution. This seems to bring up a good point about where analog has best use and where digital processing might be better for certain things.
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Post by jamesgasson on May 19, 2020 11:49:38 GMT
Yeah, I realise that this could be more effectively carried out in my DAW, however I'd like to align the signals prior to recording in order to treat two mics on a guitar amp as one signal, which has various advantages for me. I recently made a documentary about Steve Albini's drum recording technique, and in it he mentions an Eventide delay device that he uses to add a few ms of delay to room mics. Here's a screenshot: On investigation it appears that Eventide made this device specially for Steve and have no intention of rolling it out commercially. I've just discovered that it was made from a couple of DDL500s, so it's a digital device. You can see that it fits the bill perfectly. My question is -- how is it possible to get my hands on something like this? My only hope seems to be to have someone clever build me something...
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Post by Michael Lawrence on May 19, 2020 13:20:38 GMT
You can find some old Peavey IDL1000 delay lines on ebay for less than $100 each. I have some in my basement. They run at 48 kHz so you can get a delay increment down to 20 uS. They are line level so you will want to put them post-preamp.
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Post by Hexspa on May 19, 2020 17:52:45 GMT
I have some in my basement. What else is in your basement?
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