Hi there,
Ive just got a Roland RD700NX and its a fantastic keyboard.
However when I hook it up to my brand new Yamaha HTR2866 5.1 surround system there is a slight delay before the note you play comes out the speaker. Its definitely the amp as its fine with my hifi amp. Its bugging me as the sound is fantastic, its just impossible to play with this delay!
Is there any settings on the amp I could change, I tried the lipsync setting on and off and it didn't make a difference.
Im connected to AV5 with red and white phono sockets.

Any help welcome!

Unfortunately this is a feature of many surround sound systems. The delay compensates for rear speakers being closer to our ears than the front ones (generally). You need to look in the manual to see if it is possible to change either or both of Surround Delay and Initial Delay. You could also try repositioning the speakers if you are using the system purely for the digital piano.

What willf said.. I think that's it. There's a "distance" setting for the speakers that makes sure the sound from all the speakers hits the listener at the same time. Find the "distance" setting and try making that number smaller and see what happens.

Happy days, I will try that when I get home as I saw a distance setting in the menu.

Thanks very much I hope this sorts it.

I just hope its not an inherent problem with AV amplifiers as they digitally process the sound/picture introducing some delay

This was actually going to be my suggestion, that perhaps the amplifier encoding the audio to 5.1 was introducing the latency.

Cheers,
James
x

See if the receiver has a Pure or Direct mode. This will disable all additional (or nearly all) processing that's done and cuts out a large amount of latency.

When I use headphones on my Onkyo receiver, it switches to a direct mode and the latency issues vanish. When using speakers though, I have to set it to use direct which will play a stereo signal straight to the left/right speakers with minimal processing. Again, removing any noticeable latency. Without that there's all kinds of processing going on, fx been applied, delays for speaker distances and so on.

Well guys,
No such luck
Turned the speaker distances down to minimum
Put the unit in "straight" which disables all DSP's
Even tried 2 channel audio.

Still not right, and impossible to play with the amount of latency.
Such a shame as this system would have been great for practicing instead of rigging my PA system up everytime.

Ahh well!

Forgive me if this is a silly question, but how does one watch a movie if the the sound is delayed. Does the amp have a "sync" feature to match it up to the video signal?

Quick answer is, yes they have a sync feature.

There's two types of delays to contend with. The first that this thread is concerned with is an audio delay due by the sounds of it to something within the AV receiver. This kind of delay is often quite small, although noticeable with instruments. Often due to processing the receiver does to decode multichannel signals and any additional fx processing it might apply.

When watching a movie though, the bigger delay is in the picture processing where you can have 100-200ms of delay added by the tv compared to perhaps 10-40ms by your receiver. The difference if very noticeable with out of sync lips.

Most receivers have a audio delay option that you can tweak to further delay the audio to match the delay your TV will cause. However, with HDMI, there's a neat feature where all devices within the connection such as your dvd player, av receiver and tv can notify the other devices of the delays allowing the AV receiver to automatically apply the correct audio delay without you having to manually tweak it. On my receiver this is named "lip sync" and is just an on/off setting, unlike the audio delay setting which is 0-500ms.

If straight mode is still showing too great a delay, it may be worth searching for your receiver model with the latency or lag keyword added to see if anyone else has experienced it or found a workaround.

Edit: Forgot to mention the 3rd type of delay that's relevant to surround sound systems. That of the sound waves leaving the speaker and reaching your ears. As others have mentioned there's usually a distance setting that you can adjust to let the audio be delayed differently by each individual speaker so that sound reaches you at the same time. More advanced systems can also account for reflections inside your room using a mic you place in various positions (such as the audyssey system on some receivers).

Thanks Gary. Very informative.. sorry if I steered the thread OT a bit, but I was curious how that worked. My only experience with surround sound is when I go to the movie theatre.