Why do Rock Band Drumsets need to be recalibrated so often

rock-band

I used to play Rock Band 2 on my friend's PS3, but every so often it would feel completely off and need to be recalibrated. The new calibration settings always ended up as one of two or three settings:

Sound: -8ms; Video: +42ms
Sound: +8ms; Video: +22ms
(there may have been a third, I forget)

I could recalibrate multiple times, and always end up with exactly the same calibration settings (+/- 1 or 2 ms). However, next time the TV was turned off and the PS3 reset, it would sometimes feel completely off again, and recalibrating again would give one of the other settings. Recalibrating immediately a second or third time gave the same settings, however, so it's not just that I have terrible timing – the necessary calibration settings were changing, for the exact same setup.

I thought it might have been due to his freakish Panasonic TV, but now I have Rock Band of my own with a completely different setup, and it's doing exactly the same thing; so it must be something inherent in the technology. Why does it do this, and is there any way to fix/prevent it?

His setup / My Setup:

  • Panasonic Plasma TV / Sony Rear Projection TV
  • Rock Band 2 / Beatles Rock Band
  • Component Video and Audio / HDMI
  • Original Rock Band drumset (wired) / Newer Beatles Rock Band drumset (wireless)
  • Original 40GB PS3 / Newer PS3 Slim

Best Answer

There's a brilliant tutorial on completely manual calibration here by a pro-level RB player:

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I can't express enough how useful this video is. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about this topic, it's worth a watch.

How to calibrate, per this video:

  1. Completely turn off audio (set volume to 0), so you can focus on the video and hitbox.
  2. Go into quickplay and hit purposely early and late to figure out where the hitbox is for you. How early can you hit? How late can you hit? That's the size and position of your hitbox!
  3. Based on your measurement of the hitbox, move the hitbox using the positive video bias (towards you) and negative video bias (away from you) to get a centered hitbox that allows you to hit equally early and equally late
  4. Now it's time to focus on the audio.
  5. Ideally this takes two people and a simple song with a steady beat; one person closes their eyes and plays to the beat, the other person observes to see if you are hitting early or late. I know, this sounds freaky, but per the author, this is very very difficult bordering on impossible to do by eyeballing it solo.
  6. If you are hitting early, set negative audio bias to compensate. If you are hitting late, set positive audio bias to compensate.

Warning: different types of instruments may have different lag -- wireless/wired, guitar vs drums vs keyboard, etc. There's only one global audio/video lag setting, no way to set it per instrument. Thus, you should think of the hitbox as the "all controller" compensation area you use to deal with this.

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