Impact of In Ear (headphone) Latency upon Singers (Public)

all right um dave rat and today let's check out what happens when we have latency in our in-ears or headphones when we're singing with our own voice and the relationship between that latency and i'll do polarity as well between your internal resonance and what you're hearing um coming through the in-ears and headphones the interaction may not be something you generally think about but when we speak the sound comes out of our mouths and travels a short distance 4 inches or so four or five inches to our ears we hear that sound we also have the internal resonance of our body that you hear when you plug your ears which inside of your own head well that internal resonance is always there and then we've taken the sound of our mouths and we plugged up our ears with headphones or in-ears and we've regenerated that electronically and we put that back in either with analog gear we're actually introducing it at a sooner time the sound can actually come out of your mouth hit a mic go through all the analog stuff at zero latency and get your ears before the sound would have actually traveled the physical distance from your mouth to your ear so you're hearing it a little early it but typically with any digital gear it's going to show up late so a millisecond is about a foot and we start to expand that amount of time if we go into a digital wireless mic it's got a millisecond or two latency and then we go into a digital console we flip through the analog domain between the mic uh digital mic receiver and the console and then the console adds another one and a half to two and a half milliseconds and then we come out of that analog into a set of digital in-ears per se and add another millisecond or two we can get four or five milliseconds or more and then you start adding a bunch of plug-ins and we could really stretch this out to a longer time so it's taken me quite a while to figure out a way to test this and it's progressing i did another video where i taped a seducer mic to my neck and uh to grab the internal contact sound through a contact mic of my internal resonance i've done videos where i've taken in-ears and put them into my ears and used those as microphones and run those into a mic input of a console and then turned those up and again listening to the inside of my ear can or in that time listening to the inside of my ear canal this one seems to work pretty well so what i'm going to do today is i've got this little sennheiser mic it's a small little lavalier mic and i've taken an in-ear the rubber bit from an in-ear and i've fit it onto there and i'm going to push this into my ear pretty deep into the ear canal there and this mic will pick up the sound from inside my head there that'll then run into this sennheiser 2000 series ew 500 series belt pack that will then be received by this other sennheiser belt pack and go into this mixing board yeah going through the wireless domain there there isn't latency on that because it's analog or very little latency but i didn't have a phantom power source for this microphone elsewhere that was easy way to do it also what i'm looking for is this dull kind of internal sound and what's really fun and interesting is when i fire this up and i take the inside of this year and i run it into headphones and i send the sound from this year over this year it actually sounds like i'm plugging both my ears it's actually this weird surreal sonic experience this test that i'm doing has actually been quite complex to figure out i thought i had problems with my setup because i was taking the in-ear sound from my ear canal and then running that into this mixing board to these belt packs and then taking this microphone so m7 mic and running that into this mixing board taking the two outputs um into this uh xta 428 or 448 processor and um that what that allowed me to do is um record a signal that's the same there's no way to go through a digital processor and go back down to zero milliseconds so what i'm doing is i'm going to delay this this is going into input one of the processor and this mic will go into input two of the processor and then the outputs of the processor output 1 will drive this channel on the mixing board and output 2 will drive this channel and output 3 will drive this channel over here so now what i'll be able to do is set both of them to 0 milliseconds and this outputs mixing board goes in this recording device this tascam recorder which will then allow me to record this at whatever latency this digital processor is and this mic at that same latency so for the recording purposes i'll be able to slide both things through zero if that makes sense so i'm testing this out and i've got this sound of the in my ear canal and i'm talking into the mic and i'm hitting the polarity reverse between the two and i hear this drastic change to be expected the mic is different than the in-ear but then also with just the in-ear listening to that hitting the polarity verse is showing this drastic change so then i'm starting to doubt my gear i was like why do i hear this drastic change and what was happening was by altering the sound i'm hearing from my ear canal out of polarity with my own sound which i can't get away from i was unable to hear unable the polarity of verse is so noticeable so i actually had to stop and record everything and listen to the difference and then i got um someone else to listen to this and said does this sound the same i ran pink noise in and made sure that the polarity verse wasn't i thought maybe there was something wrong with the gear but um it wasn't it was um actually an artifact of what i'm actually trying to test here today so let's get started i'm going to um put this get that little white because i'm going to go way in there i put this mic way into my ear and now this cable noise from this mic can be quite annoying for both me and you so i'm going to clip this mic cable off to my hair here and minimize the amount of um my cable noise hey hey hey two two two okay so we can inside [Music] and i will turn on the microphone a1222 and that should be coming in as well for me to hear that i have to turn the headphones around the other way hey hey 222 and there it is all right so here are two inputs one two two [Music] hello [Music] microphone instead hello hello one two yep yep yep and i'll bring those two together so listening to um in-ears i've brought up the microphone so this would be you bringing up the microphone into your ears and hearing the internal resonance of your body in addition to that those two will sum together but what happens if the in-ears are or the headphones are out of polarity so i will switch those so i will go to the polarity here and we'll switch we're in polarity and that's outer polarity hello hello hello and you should be able to hear that i can't hear it because in this year so i'll find out later on and out of polarity we've got then back into polarity um this is going to be interesting because i'm unable to hear a lot of what's going on here i know what should happen and later on we'll find out if it does so the next thing is with this back in polarity i'm going to start to show what latency sounds like so this is at zero milliseconds and what i'm going to do is since we cannot delay our internal resonance that's always going to be zero i'm going to leave that at zero and what i will do is i will delay the signal being set from the microphone here all right so we're at zero milliseconds hello hello hello and there's one millisecond delay so if you've gone through a unit that has a single millisecond that sound would be there and this will go back to zero milliseconds here zero milliseconds one millisecond two milliseconds of delay two two two two okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to um what will i do i will indicate 2 2 2 and going down 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 hey okay and i slid up to 2. let's go to three three milliseconds of delay so i'm going to continue talking to you and show you what four milliseconds sounds like and we'll continue to five milliseconds and go on up to six milliseconds and work our way to seven milliseconds i feel like an auctioneer going to eight milliseconds do we have a take around eight milliseconds going to nine nine milliseconds and two ten milliseconds and we're gonna go all the way back down to one millisecond here and to zero milliseconds i'm going to do the exact same adventure except i'm going to polarity reverse at each step so zero milliseconds and we're going to one millisecond and with one millisecond we have in polarity to outer polarity and we will go up to [Music] in polarity and we're gonna go to two milliseconds two milliseconds in polarity and two milliseconds out of polarity out of polarity in polarity and let's go to three milliseconds three milliseconds and this is uh in polarity and three milliseconds outer polarity and just to make things uh easier i'm gonna slide all the way up to um while it's out of polarity hey hey hey three milliseconds four milliseconds five milliseconds six milliseconds seven milliseconds eight milliseconds nine milliseconds and ten milliseconds out of polarity and we will go in polarity and go back down the other way 10 milliseconds nine milliseconds eight millisecond seven and seven milliseconds six milliseconds five milliseconds four milliseconds three milliseconds two milliseconds one millisecond and zero milliseconds all right i'm gonna go from zero milliseconds to ten milliseconds and each time you hear a click that will be an additional millisecond and i'll do a more consistent tone so the cow goes [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] and that's 10 milliseconds um i will go back down the other way cow goes [Laughter] and i'll do it polarity reverse so the first thing i'm going to do is swap polarity and then i'll increment up so let's do the clarity first polarity hey and now we'll increment up and um and that should do it um the whole point of this is to show that latency of the in-ear or monitor sand interacts with our natural resonance creating differences in tonality that are perceived by a person singing and listening to themselves or someone sing and this also occurs if somebody wearing in-ear stands near a base rig and the bass has [Music] the acoustic sound coming out and you feel it in your body or they feel in the body and you've got the electronic version of the sound showing up in the ears and the timing between the acoustic arrival and the electronic arrival will have some interaction how much that is will depend on the differentials between the sound if it's very very loud in the ears your natural resonance is going to be less a factor if the in-ears are very quiet and you're if the inners are very quiet and you're singing very loud or you're they're very close to the same volume this interaction is going to be more pronounced um you know digital how much digital latency you're you're inducing onto the signal all of these are factors and the polarities of factor for monitor engineers or listening in headphones and studio monitoring through headphones having this knowledge and knowing that interaction is there and being able to address it may be the tool in your toolbox which solves a problem or gets you a gig or just interesting stuff cuckoo hope you enjoyed it and i will do more soon awesome hope you enjoyed the video and also hey check out soundtools.com a bunch of products i personally design and manufacture problem solving stuff for um pro audio and um yeah it's it's fun and it's um something else i enjoyed doing in addition to sharing the knowledge that i wish people would shared with me when i was starting in this industry and also rat sales ratsound.com is we have a sales department we sell all kinds of pro audio gear give us a shout and we'll give advice we've got an install department as well as a rental department which is um you know how i started in this business when i was 17 and you know that's built up to we do big festivals like coachella festival and pearl jam and jack johnson blink 182 and other major artists as well as smaller stuff so yeah if you need something in pro audio or video lighting or whatever give us a shout and we'll help you out [Music] hmm

Channel: Dave Rat

Views: 5,046

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Dave Rat, Pro Audio, Rat Sound., Mixing Tips, Pro Audio Mixing, Pro Sound, Live Sound, SoundTools, Rat Sound Systems, Audio Engineer, Sound Engineer

Id: APj0ZaMy4Xw

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021