Howdy all,

The other day while tinkering I had one of Carlos Ramirez' videos playing in the background and I heard him mention that he tweaks time alignment (delay) on his tunes because it boosts mid bass. I got to fooling around with my DSP and sure enough it made a difference for me.

I always felt like something was off when I put the new Hertz Neos in my lids. It really sounded like a phasing problem. The mids were great but I didn't really need more mids from the rear, the ADs in my pods handle that beautifully. When I switched off all the other speakers you could hear good bass from them, but as I switched on the other three pairs it seemed to die out. I checked the wiring polarity and even used a pop test to verified all eight speakers were wired in the same polarity.

So after hearing Carlos talk about time delay I plugged up my DSP and started tinkering. When I switched the phase of the rear speakers I immediately heard more bass. Something wasn't quite right though. It sounded muddy. I did some Googling and found this article from American Hardbag (they have given me good tuning advice in their articles before regarding Q adjustments):

DSR1 Practical Phase and Time Alignment Tricks

I just started moving sliders around and found out when I added two milliseconds of delay to the front four speakers there was a MAJOR improvement in mid bass. I was really surprised. Conventional wisdom says that each foot of space away from the speaker needs a little over .8 ms delay to compensate, but from my head the fairing speakers and lids are about the same distance. I don't know why it helped or exactly what is going on but I do know I have more bass now.

Strange...