Science of Sound: Why You Hear the Crack After the Smack

Ever noticed you see a cricket ball hit before you hear the crack?

That’s because light and sound travel at very different speeds.

Light moves at about 300,000 km per second — instant, for all practical purposes.

Sound? Much slower — around 343 metres per second in air.

So if you’re sitting far back in a stadium, what you see and what you hear are out of sync. The further you are, the longer that sound wave takes to reach you.

Now imagine being a sound engineer at a concert. You’ve got thousands of people spread across hundreds of metres — and you can’t have the audience at the back hearing the music half a second late!

So engineers use delay systems: extra speakers placed further away, programmed to play the sound milliseconds later so that everyone — from the front row to the nosebleeds — hears the beat at the same time.

It’s the same physics as that cricket match, just with far better timing.

🎶 𝗜’𝗺 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗻 𝗢’𝗡𝗲𝗶𝗹𝗹 — 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗞𝗶𝗱𝘀 𝗔𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗺𝘆

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