Linked Zones Delay Compensation

That sounds like a bug. Our support for Meridian’s zone linking (which works very differently from RAAT’s) is pretty basic.

This seems plausible.

Supporting a delay compensation setting would not be difficult. The tricky thing is figuring out how the delays vary under different conditions and how to represent in the configuration experience. Sample rate is a big point of potential variance. If a hardware product is designed to maximize utilization of its DSP hardware, it may be running filters with different delay behavior at different rates.

Some bridges/DACs undoubtedly mis-report their output delay to us as well. There just isn’t that much software doing synchronized playback through USB devices, so it would be an easy thing to miss during driver development. One of our goals in this marketplace is to push DAC/Bridge/Driver vendors to make better stuff by pushing the limits. Our users are feeling this to some extent with Roon’s recent dependence on detecting supported formats in advance and over the next few weeks, we’ll probably learn something about how good or bad DACs/bridges are at reporting their output delays.

I talked with Devialet. The Phantoms have a delay of 80ms. It is possible to change the the delay of the Expert to 20ms. More isn´t possible. A technican can disable Spark on the Phantoms for 20ms on the Phantoms. If I would do this, I would further only be able to use the toslink connenction with the Phantoms.

Ok. I think we’re going to expose a setting to let you compensate on Roon’s side. It’s silly to modify the device. I’m sure this isn’t the only case where a device has a built-in delay.

2 Likes

That’s interesting. Not wishing to muddy the waters but I’d read in a few places that Phantoms weren’t suitable for home cinema right now due to their circa 200ms delay. But if Devialet say its 80ms it must be 80ms.

Great to know there will be a delay feature coming.

The expert delay is done in microseconds which doesn’t seem standard (Dirac reported my L-R delay as 0.31ms) and took me a while to work out. Didn’t realise the limit was 20ms though, but I suppose for speaker offsets, thats quite generous. Not sure why I’m writing that. I guess just in case it catches anyone out.