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How to Deal with Delays on a professional Mixer


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Hi All,

 

I've been seeing a number of Cooper Mixers come up for sale recently, was interested in potentially getting one. But I have a question about how people mixed on them (i.e. non-mixing surfaces for recorders, purely mixers) with wireless and hardline.

 

With my recorders I always have 3.5ms to 6ms of delay on my hardline channels due to the wireless having a delay. How did people used to deal with this back in Cooper and Nagra days considering there doesn't seem to be a delay function?

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Well, this needs to be put into a time perspective  ---  for me, using the Cooper Mixers (starting with one of the first mixer Andy ever built, the 106) the first 30 or more movies we used very little wireless and  everything was analog (no latency or delay). When I started using digital wireless (original Zaxcom fully digital wireless) I was aware of the delay but it never really seemed to pose any problem for me and my style of mixing a scene. It must have something to do with the way I mixed, or covered a scene, that I never understood the "problem" that people talked about (and still talk about, using delay in their recorder/mixer, etc.). Someone else will have a better answer for this I'm sure, but for me it was never a problem. 

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I would agree that, personally, I feel more is made of this than is really there. I juuuust moved from my analog board to a control surface. I didn’t worry about wireless latency then, and I don’t worry about it now. 

If what we’re talking about, and really worrying about, is phase correlation in the time domain, it’s a bit of a moot point, as both talent and the boom are constantly moving. Further to this point, if we know that sound moves at aprox 1ms/ft, then the difference In arrival time between a wireless mic with a 3ms delay, and that of the hardlined  boom at a distance is even smaller. If we start adjusting delay times to accommodate for the wireless latency, it’s really just moving the potential problem (not removing it). 
 

That said, if you are mixing wireless brands and/or technologies, I could see wanting to get all of your wireless latencies adjusted to match one another. 
 

I suppose it’s possible that this is more of an issue for some in certain facets of our industry than mine. I rarely find myself mixing booms and wires 1:1 for any length of time. I’m generally just grabbing a line or chunk of dialog that the boom can’t get to…Even here, my finger is constantly riding the boom level while listening for both background consistency and combing between sources. If I hear a problem, a simple polarity flip usually corrects for it. 
 

That’s my experience, but the physics doesn’t change. 

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