-
Jesse,
You’ve definitely opened a can of worms thinking about managing different arrival times, huh?
Your initial though of pushing earlier arrival times back in time (guitar amp/ vibes mics) to coincide with the latest arriving one (phone mics) is logical. It’s how we manage delay tower speakers at festival. Hold (delay) the signal feeding the delay tower until the main speakers have made that trip through the slow medium of air traveling at the speed of sound. As Dana pointed out, roughly a foot per millisecond. The two sources of sound can combine constructively if time and polarity-aligned. That translates to greater intelligibility, and an improved S/N ratio (signal to noise.) More dry signal level than ambient signal level.
I’m really disappointed that the Stonehenge joke in the first reply didn’t land.
Because dropping and dragging start times in the DAW is so easy you can opt to “pull” the late arrivals back to your self declared start time. That’s what we were suggesting. “Pulling’ the phone mic arrivals back to the vibe overheads. Your close mic’ed guitar would be the first arrival time to show up on the DAW session if you’re both playing the ONE! Just pull all the simultaneously struck “ONES” back to your amp arrival. Voila! Signal alignment may help clean up the sound OR not. If there’s not too much other-than-intended-signal in the microphone, the time misalignment may add spatial character which could be a better choice.
I believe it was Aristotle that said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t.” I just added the worms part.
-@PT