You will also notice this playing your guitar through an amp with no effects in a large room. You may know this kind of delay as “echo'. This is what allows us to yell bad words into the Grand Canyon and hear them come back a few seconds later. Acoustic DelayĪcoustic delay is the speed that sound waves travel through the air. The methods of doing this vary, but the three most common are acoustic delay, mechanical delay and electronic delay. Simply put, delay is making a sound repeat at a later time. Here, we're going to focus on what happens when a signal is delayed 30 milliseconds or more. Though we don’t hear delay effects clocking in at less than 30 milliseconds as distinct and separate sounds, we do hear them, and they can be used to thicken a signal or add ambience via effects like doubling, phasing and flanging. That's the measurable cut-off for when a human can distinguish one sound from another.
