Haas Effect

[markof]

In my desktop setup, the speakers are placed very near to my office chair, approximately a metre.
I have a slight amount of hearing loss in my right ear and so have been experimenting with the speaker set-up dsp in Roon.

The distance between my head and the left and right speakers is almost, but not quite equal, so I entered this into Roon which introduced a 0.06ms delay to the nearer speaker.

Here's my point - the soundstage immediately widened due to what I believe is called the Haas Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedence_effect) and is used frequently in recording engineering to achieve this effect. The adjustment is similar to toeing out the speakers and can result in a soundstage hole in the middle if applied too liberally and I understand that phasing effects can occur on certain settings as well.

It's a very interesting phenomenon though and I wonder if anyone here has experienced or experimented with it?

Mark

[Fran]

That's interesting stuff. In short I haven't ever tricked about with it - other than the usual experimenting we all do with speaker positioning....

There are many advocates of room measurement though, and I remember hearing the Smyth sound realiser in Munich a few years back. It was stupendous what it could do. It was the freakiest thing ever. So there is a much potential there alright.