Before we begin to discuss delay, echo, and reverb, let’s take a second to talk about the Haas effect. The Haas effect is more than a cool sounding audio trick. It makes for a really useful landmark when remembering what’s otherwise a bunch of really arbitrary meaningless numbers.
It’s easy to imagine a delay of a thousand millisecond, that’s a second, five hundred milliseconds, that’s a half a second, but can you visualize five milliseconds or about a hundred or thirty? We all have this thing called an echo threshold, which is the point at which two sounds, which are exactly the same, are perceived as one, as your brain starts to try and make sense of how two identical signals can possibly be so close together. It’s not a fixed number, it varies from person to person, as well as with the program material itself, but a good ballpark figure is in the twenty to thirty millisecond range.
And for me, that’s what makes the Haas effect particularly useful. Anything inside of that threshold starts to sound like stereo or chorus or phase type effects. Outside of it, we hear it as a discrete second sound.
There are lots of applications for this, but frequently we use this technique to create a pseudo-stereo effect by panning the two signals hard left and right. This is also known as the precedence effect. Learning about acoustics and audio effects isn’t just fun, it opens the door to a world of music production.
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