CSD3700 DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA ENGINEERING
HASS EFFECT
The Haas effect or the Precedence Effect is a Psychoacoustic Effect described by Helmut Haas as the ability of our ears to localize sounds coming from anywhere around us.
In short, our ears determine the position of a sound based on which ear perceives it first and its successive reflections (arriving within 1-35 ms from the initial sound) which, will give us the perception of depth and spaciousness. Pretty simple!
In general, we use our pan knobs to position sounds within the stereo field. If we have a sound coming out of a stereo pair of speakers at an equal volume, our ears will interpret that the sound is coming out from the middle. So, panning is not much more than the amount of volume you send to each speaker… Let’s remember that our ears depend on not only volume but also on time and frequency differences for the localization of sounds.
It works like this, if you create two of the same mono track and pan one hard left and the other hard right, you can affect where the track sits in the stereo image by adding a slight delay to one of the tracks. If you delay the right-panned channel by five milliseconds so that it plays slightly behind the left-panned channel, the track will sound like its much more prominent in the left channel, despite the fact that the levels are the same on both, The more delay you add, the more directional the sound feels. However, once you go beyond around seven milliseconds of delay, it will have more of a widening effect on your mix than a directional one.