Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad
The NBA found that long cable lengths could actually cause a delay in their systems which resulted in the clocks and LEDs being out of sync. They make adjustments to compensate for this problem.
It's definitely possible that the clock in the arena is out of sync with the LEDs by 0.1 seconds —*I think that is likely the case here.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JetMetFan
It's physics. The signal dissipates the longer the cable run. That's why the clocks on the backboard will be slightly a head of a clock that's overhead or those on a balcony. I haven't been in Westchester Co. Arena - where this game was played - but my guess is the camera clock was on the overhead device. If it had been on one of the backboard clocks everything would have been in sync as far as the broadcast was concerned since those hit 0.0 as the LEDs came on.
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I can tell you one thing for certain, it isn't the length of the cables. And you'd know that if you understood physics.
Cables are dramatically faster than that at any length possible in even the largest arena...unless they're using the worst cables ever made.
Let say the cables in an arena in New York were routed to Chicago and back before going to the a scoreboard. That is about 1600 miles round trip (about 3 millions meters). Typical networking cable propagation times are about 500 nanoseconds per 100 meters. If you do the math (just approximating here), it takes about 15/1000 of one second to go from New York to Chicago and back. You could even go back and forth between the two cities about 6-7 times before you get 0.1 second of delay.
Even if you don't want to to the math, just think of phone calls. If you could get 0.1 second of cable delay inside of a building (worst case of 1000m) and you were on the phone in New York, you'd have to wait over 5 minutes to hear what your friend in LA says. And then they'd have to wait 5 more minutes to hear your response. Do you recall any telephones that work that way?
For that matter, you can send a signal to the moon in under 1 second (sure it is radio, but the speeds are on the same order of magnitude).