Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House

Automatic Calibration

One of the major things we were excited about with Rock Band 2 was the automatic calibration feature. For gamers who have trouble with calibration, there really hasn't been an easy way to get video and audio all matched up. This can cause all sorts of frustration. The Rock Band 2 guitar features a camera and a microphone that can be used to sense the actual delay down to the millisecond for both video and audio.

Those two circles in the center are the camera and mic. The camera is the bigger one.

The drawback is that automatic calibration isn't as consistent as we would have thought it would be. Depending on the distance from the screen or the speaker, we can see about a 5ms swing on video delay and a 10ms swing on audio delay. Calibration was more consistent when the controller was held right up to either the screen or the speaker, but generally people don't put their head right up next to a speaker when playing Rock Band.

The variability in the video wasn't something we could really notice and the automatic calibration worked very well. With the audio, the larger swing did have an impact we could feel. After calibrating it a few times and playing with it, we were able to decide what delay felt best and manually set it to that.

While we were less impressed with the automatic calibration than we thought we would be, it will absolutely do one thing to help out: it will make calibration consistent between different people's set ups. If I go to a friends house and play with their setup and they automatically calibrated it, I can expect the same degree of error I had when I set it up myself. It's not the be all end all of calibration, but it is certainly better than leaving it up to the eyes and ears of one person in a room who may or may not be able to match timing to sight and sound in tune with reality.