So I can't take full credit for making what I think is a pretty big discovery, but recently a user on Reddit put up a post that made a pretty watertight case that the LFE channel on Beck's Sea Change is 8ms delayed from the 5 main channels. That got me thinking because as we know, Porcupine Tree's In Absentia also suffers the same problem (I think @edisonbaggins discovered this, correct me if I'm wrong), and both of those 5.1 mixes were done by Elliot Scheiner in roughly the same time frame.
I started to wonder if Scheiner was the common denominator here, or if this was just some kind of fluke, or possibly if this was an intentional thing, like some part of the LFE creation process that I didn't understand and that the channel was meant to be offset slightly.
So because I have my entire collection ripped to files, I started going through some of the obvious ones to see if any others exhibited the same issue. The first couple I tried (America's Homecoming and Grover Washington, Jr's Winelight) were fine, but then I moved on to Donald Fagen and found that both The Nightfly and Kamakiriad had the same issue while Morph the Cat was fine.
At that point it seemed like it was pretty obvious that this issue wasn't confined to one or two discs, so I decided a more methodical approach was necessary, so summoning all of my nerd powers, I created a spreadsheet of either most (or all) of Scheiner's 5.1 music-only mixes (I don't have the interest, time or ability to do this for DVD or BluRay video) culled from the Surround Engineers poll information and augmented/double-checked with all his surround mixing credits on discogs.
Over the last few days I've gone through my entire collection of Scheiner's 5.1 mixes (I have most of them, except for the R.E.M. ones, Boz Scaggs Dig, and a handful of other stragglers) and determined which ones are fine, and which ones aren't, and for the defective ones, what adjustments need to be made. My process was pretty thorough: after importing a track from an album that I'd identified as faulty into my DAW (Nuendo 4.3) I zoomed way in and eye-matched the waveform of the LFE track with the waveforms of the front three channels (where most of the bass content usually is in the main mix) and then listened to the results on headphones - the result there was always that there was more bass after my adjustment. Lastly I checked my work using the phase correlation meter in the Voxengo SPAN VST plugin and always showed that my changes turned the LFE channel from being totally out of phase to fully in phase.
What my research revealed is that this issue started to crop up sometime partway through 2002 (his earliest 5.1 mixes, like the Doobie Bros. Captain and Me and Toy Matinee's self titled albums, both released in 2001 are fine) and then remedied itself sometime in 2003 - some 2003 mixes, and everything 2004 and onward is fine, bar some phase issues. However, not including the aforementioned titles I was unable to check, there are at least 12 of Scheiner's 5.1 mixes (across both DVD-A and SACD) that suffer from this problem.
The unusual thing is that (as I'll outline in the table below) is that the amount of delay seems to vary from album to album - several are in the 4ms - 5ms range, but Queen's A Night at the Opera is 6ms, Steely Dan's Everything Must Go is 7ms, Sea Change is 8ms, and Porcupine Tree's In Absentia (the worst offender) is 9ms.
This is a graphic I made of a selection of the "faulty" albums - the blue line is to give you a sense of time alignment, and then the red arrows point out the ridge in the LFE waveform that's lagging behind and should be under the blue line:
Compare that with a release that doesn't have the same problem, Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat - this is from the intro to the title track, which has those heavy bass notes:
(Notice how perfectly everything lines up compared to the previous "faulty" examples.)
If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering "does this affect me?" and the answer is yes, especially if you're using bass management (ie running your front speakers in 'small' mode). If you're running all your speakers in 'large' mode (ie no low frequency content from the mains is being crossed over into the sub) this delay issue will only manifest itself as a slight lack of tightness in the low end, sort of like a very (very) short bass echo, but in 'small' mode, where the bass content from the main channels is being crossed over and sent to the LFE along with the dedicated LFE content, there's a serious phase cancellation issue that will rob any mix of a considerable amount of bass. A number of the titles in the table below like Fagen's Nightfly and Kamakiriad, Toto's Toto IV, and Steely Dan's Everything Must Go (especially in comparison to Fagen's Morph the Cat) have always seemed a little light in the low end and I believe this issue accounts for that shortcoming. The difference isn't night and day like with titles where the LFE is actually phase inverted (like the Jeff Beck Blow by Blow SACD for example) because that's a 100% loss of whatever's duplicated between the out-of-phase channels, but the difference to my ears was significant - the bass sounded tighter, more prominent, less boomy, and extended deeper in to the lower frequencies.
Full disclosure here, I haven't actually listened to all of these albums with my fixes applied on my 5.1 system (only selected tracks) but everything I've heard both in surround and downmixed to stereo on my headphones suggests that I'm correct. I'm kind of hoping that someone with actual professional experience (like resident QQ mastering genius @Plan9 ) can validate my conclusions before I go modifying more than a dozen albums.
As far as a hypothesis on how this might have happened, the only educated guess I can make is that Scheiner was either using a piece of outboard gear to do his LFE channel creation that induced a slight delay, or a computer plugin that didn't compensate for latency induced by processing time. I think this is the likeliest scenario because, having critically listened to the LFE channels on every one of these albums on headphones, they all sound to me like a low-pass filtered mono sum of the 5 main channels (ie the result of some kind of process) rather than having anything intentionally discretely mixed there, like (for example) the Chycki Rush 5.1 mixes, which have full-range bass guitar in the LFE, which would suggest a mastering issue rather than a mixing issue. I do, however, thing it would be wise to look at more DVD-A/SACD releases from around the same 2002-2003 timeframe these were released to find out if this LFE problem was more widespread than just Elliot Scheiner's mixing rig. I personally haven't noticed any in any of the discs I've ever looked at, but it doesn't hurt to be 100% sure.
So you're probably saying to yourself "that's fine and dandy, Dave, but I don't have the time, patience, or money to learn how to operate all the high-fallootin' technical contraptions to fix this!" (or words to that effect) and the good news on that front is that (if you have your music ripped to 5.1 files) Forum Genius @HomerJAU is working on an update to his fantastic Music Media Helper app that will allow you to adjust the the time alignment of the LFE channel relative to the other channels. So all you need to do is point it at the folder where the album is, input the value in milliseconds, and it'll do the rest. I'm sure he'll post when it's done, but I believe it should be ready in the next few days and will work with both FLAC and DSD (.dsf) files.
[Delay time in bold means the results have been verified for all tracks.]
(If anyone can help with the missing albums, that would be great - a screenshot of foobar's 6 channel oscilloscope (or similar) at a moment where there's a big bass hit, like in the images I posted above, will allow me to discern which albums are good immediately, and which ones are bad and need LFE delay figured out.)
I started to wonder if Scheiner was the common denominator here, or if this was just some kind of fluke, or possibly if this was an intentional thing, like some part of the LFE creation process that I didn't understand and that the channel was meant to be offset slightly.
So because I have my entire collection ripped to files, I started going through some of the obvious ones to see if any others exhibited the same issue. The first couple I tried (America's Homecoming and Grover Washington, Jr's Winelight) were fine, but then I moved on to Donald Fagen and found that both The Nightfly and Kamakiriad had the same issue while Morph the Cat was fine.
At that point it seemed like it was pretty obvious that this issue wasn't confined to one or two discs, so I decided a more methodical approach was necessary, so summoning all of my nerd powers, I created a spreadsheet of either most (or all) of Scheiner's 5.1 music-only mixes (I don't have the interest, time or ability to do this for DVD or BluRay video) culled from the Surround Engineers poll information and augmented/double-checked with all his surround mixing credits on discogs.
Over the last few days I've gone through my entire collection of Scheiner's 5.1 mixes (I have most of them, except for the R.E.M. ones, Boz Scaggs Dig, and a handful of other stragglers) and determined which ones are fine, and which ones aren't, and for the defective ones, what adjustments need to be made. My process was pretty thorough: after importing a track from an album that I'd identified as faulty into my DAW (Nuendo 4.3) I zoomed way in and eye-matched the waveform of the LFE track with the waveforms of the front three channels (where most of the bass content usually is in the main mix) and then listened to the results on headphones - the result there was always that there was more bass after my adjustment. Lastly I checked my work using the phase correlation meter in the Voxengo SPAN VST plugin and always showed that my changes turned the LFE channel from being totally out of phase to fully in phase.
What my research revealed is that this issue started to crop up sometime partway through 2002 (his earliest 5.1 mixes, like the Doobie Bros. Captain and Me and Toy Matinee's self titled albums, both released in 2001 are fine) and then remedied itself sometime in 2003 - some 2003 mixes, and everything 2004 and onward is fine, bar some phase issues. However, not including the aforementioned titles I was unable to check, there are at least 12 of Scheiner's 5.1 mixes (across both DVD-A and SACD) that suffer from this problem.
The unusual thing is that (as I'll outline in the table below) is that the amount of delay seems to vary from album to album - several are in the 4ms - 5ms range, but Queen's A Night at the Opera is 6ms, Steely Dan's Everything Must Go is 7ms, Sea Change is 8ms, and Porcupine Tree's In Absentia (the worst offender) is 9ms.
This is a graphic I made of a selection of the "faulty" albums - the blue line is to give you a sense of time alignment, and then the red arrows point out the ridge in the LFE waveform that's lagging behind and should be under the blue line:
Compare that with a release that doesn't have the same problem, Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat - this is from the intro to the title track, which has those heavy bass notes:
(Notice how perfectly everything lines up compared to the previous "faulty" examples.)
If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering "does this affect me?" and the answer is yes, especially if you're using bass management (ie running your front speakers in 'small' mode). If you're running all your speakers in 'large' mode (ie no low frequency content from the mains is being crossed over into the sub) this delay issue will only manifest itself as a slight lack of tightness in the low end, sort of like a very (very) short bass echo, but in 'small' mode, where the bass content from the main channels is being crossed over and sent to the LFE along with the dedicated LFE content, there's a serious phase cancellation issue that will rob any mix of a considerable amount of bass. A number of the titles in the table below like Fagen's Nightfly and Kamakiriad, Toto's Toto IV, and Steely Dan's Everything Must Go (especially in comparison to Fagen's Morph the Cat) have always seemed a little light in the low end and I believe this issue accounts for that shortcoming. The difference isn't night and day like with titles where the LFE is actually phase inverted (like the Jeff Beck Blow by Blow SACD for example) because that's a 100% loss of whatever's duplicated between the out-of-phase channels, but the difference to my ears was significant - the bass sounded tighter, more prominent, less boomy, and extended deeper in to the lower frequencies.
Full disclosure here, I haven't actually listened to all of these albums with my fixes applied on my 5.1 system (only selected tracks) but everything I've heard both in surround and downmixed to stereo on my headphones suggests that I'm correct. I'm kind of hoping that someone with actual professional experience (like resident QQ mastering genius @Plan9 ) can validate my conclusions before I go modifying more than a dozen albums.
As far as a hypothesis on how this might have happened, the only educated guess I can make is that Scheiner was either using a piece of outboard gear to do his LFE channel creation that induced a slight delay, or a computer plugin that didn't compensate for latency induced by processing time. I think this is the likeliest scenario because, having critically listened to the LFE channels on every one of these albums on headphones, they all sound to me like a low-pass filtered mono sum of the 5 main channels (ie the result of some kind of process) rather than having anything intentionally discretely mixed there, like (for example) the Chycki Rush 5.1 mixes, which have full-range bass guitar in the LFE, which would suggest a mastering issue rather than a mixing issue. I do, however, thing it would be wise to look at more DVD-A/SACD releases from around the same 2002-2003 timeframe these were released to find out if this LFE problem was more widespread than just Elliot Scheiner's mixing rig. I personally haven't noticed any in any of the discs I've ever looked at, but it doesn't hurt to be 100% sure.
So you're probably saying to yourself "that's fine and dandy, Dave, but I don't have the time, patience, or money to learn how to operate all the high-fallootin' technical contraptions to fix this!" (or words to that effect) and the good news on that front is that (if you have your music ripped to 5.1 files) Forum Genius @HomerJAU is working on an update to his fantastic Music Media Helper app that will allow you to adjust the the time alignment of the LFE channel relative to the other channels. So all you need to do is point it at the folder where the album is, input the value in milliseconds, and it'll do the rest. I'm sure he'll post when it's done, but I believe it should be ready in the next few days and will work with both FLAC and DSD (.dsf) files.
| Artist | Title | Formats | Release Year | LFE Issue? | Adjustment (ms) | Notes / Other Issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| America | Homecoming | DVD-A/SACD | 2001 | NO | ||
| Beck | Sea Change | DVD-A/SACD/BDA | 2002 | YES | 8ms | SACD & BDA: FL & FR are out of phase (DVD-A is OK) |
| Beck | Guero | DVD-A | 2006 | YES | 0ms | Track 1-12 LFE is out of phase / Track 13 is OK |
| Beyonce | Beyonce: The Visual Album | BD-V/DVD-V | 2014 | NO | ||
| Derek and The Dominos | Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs | DTS DVD-V | 2011 | NO | ||
| Doobie Bros. | The Captain and Me | DVD-A/SACD | 2001 | NO | ||
| Dylan, Bob | Blood on the Tracks | SACD | 2003 | YES | 6ms | |
| Eagles | Hell Freezes Over | DTS CD/DVD-V | 1997 | MAYBE | LFE either out of phase or misaligned | |
| Eagles | Hotel California | DVD-A/SACD | 2001 | NO | ||
| Eric Clapton | 461 Ocean Blvd. | BDA | 2013 | NO | Give Me Strength' Box Set | |
| Fagen, Donald | The Nightfly | DVD-A/SACD | 2002 | YES | 4ms | |
| Fagen, Donald | Kamakiriad | DVD-A | 2003 | YES | 4ms | |
| Fagen, Donald | Morph the Cat | DVD-A | 2006 | NO | ||
| Flaming Lips | Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots | DVD-A | 2003 | YES | 5ms | |
| Guns 'N' Roses | Appetite For Destruction | BDA | 2018 | NO | ||
| Foo Fighters | In Your Honor | DVD-A | 2005 | NO | ||
| Hill, Faith | Cry | DVD-A | 2002 | YES | 4ms | (different delays on different tracks) |
| Lukather, Steve | Candyman | DTS CD | 2002 | YES | TBD | (per HaikuBass) |
| Lynyrd Skynyrd | Southern Surroundings | DVD-A/BDA | 2012 | NO | ||
| Mallet, Alain | Mutt Slang | DTS DVD-V | 2016 | |||
| Mallet, Alain | Mutt Slang II: A Wake of Sorrows | FLAC D/L | 2020 | NO | ||
| Morrison, Van | Moondance | BDA | 2013 | NO | ||
| Neville, Aaron | Nature Boy: The Standards Album | DVD-A/SACD | 2003 | YES | 5ms | |
| New York Voices | Let It Snow | SACD | 2014 | YES | TBD | |
| Orbison, Roy | Black & White Night | DVD-A/SACD | 2004 | NO | ||
| Porcupine Tree | In Absentia | DVD-A | 2003 | YES | 9ms | LFE needs 7.6dB boost / Center channel is out of phase |
| Porcupine Tree | Deadwing | DVD-A | 2005 | NO | ||
| Queen | A Night at the Opera | DVD-A | 2002 | YES | 6ms | Withdrawn 1st mix |
| R.E.M. | Automatic for the People | DVD-A | 2003 | YES | 7ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| R.E.M. | In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 | DVD-A | 2003 | YES | TBD | (per AYanguas, approx 6ms) |
| R.E.M. | Document | DVD-A | 2003 | NO | ||
| R.E.M. | Green | DVD-A | 2005 | YES | 7ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| R.E.M. | Out of Time | DVD-A | 2005 | YES | 7ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| R.E.M. | Reveal | DVD-A | 2002 | YES | 4ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| R.E.M. | Monster | DVD-A | 2005 | YES | 7ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| R.E.M. | Up | DVD-A | 2005 | YES | 7ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| R.E.M. | New Adventures in Hi-Fi | DVD-A | 2005 | YES | 2ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| R.E.M. | Around the Sun | DVD-A | 2005 | YES | 3ms | (per MrSmithers) |
| Scaggs, Boz | Dig | DVD-A | 2001 | YES | TBD | (per MrSmithers) |
| Steely Dan | Everything Must Go | DVD-A | 2003 | YES | 7ms | |
| Steely Dan | Gaucho (1998 Mix) | DTS CD | 1998 | NO | ||
| Steely Dan | Gaucho (2003 Mix) | DVD-A/SACD | 2003 | NO | ||
| Steely Dan | Two Against Nature | DVD-A | 2002 | NO | ||
| Sting | Brand New Day | DTS CD/DVD-A/SACD | 1999 | NO | ||
| Toto | Toto IV | SACD/BDA | 2003 | YES | 4ms [1-2,4-9] 8ms [3, 10] | |
| Toy Matinee | Toy Matinee | DTS CD/DVD-A | 2001 | NO | ||
| Washington Jr., Grover | Winelight | DVD-A/SACD | 2002 | NO |
[Delay time in bold means the results have been verified for all tracks.]
(If anyone can help with the missing albums, that would be great - a screenshot of foobar's 6 channel oscilloscope (or similar) at a moment where there's a big bass hit, like in the images I posted above, will allow me to discern which albums are good immediately, and which ones are bad and need LFE delay figured out.)
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Also Boz Scaggs has it it too as far as I can see...
