Author Archives: Nigel Redmon

Building a windowed sinc filter

As promised, here’s our windowed sinc calculator for building a 2x oversampling filter:  Factor  Length  Rejection  Gain Notes: Use the Tab or Enter keys to effect changes (most browsers), or press Calculate. The frequency axis is in multiples of the … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, FIR Filters, Filters, Impulse Response, Sample Rate Conversion | 2 Comments

Towards practical resampling

In a previous article, we looked at sample rate conversion in the frequency domain. Let’s take a quick second look in the time domain as reinforcement of principles behind sample rate conversion, before developing a practical rate convertor. In an … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, FIR Filters, Filters, Impulse Response, Sample Rate Conversion | 4 Comments

The sound of dither

Dithering is about spreading errors out, so that they aren’t related to the sampled signal. A constant background hiss is easier to ignore than tones that change depending on signal frequencies and amplitude. Here’s a fixed-frequency sine wave, truncated to … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, Dither | 3 Comments

Blog birth

Sometimes I get email asking a question—a question that I think others might have. Sometimes I’d like to write some helpful notes, but maybe it doesn’t warrant a full article. Or sometimes I’d like to address a subject in pieces. … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Sample rate conversion

Here we explain how sample rate conversion works. As an essential prerequisite, you must understand the principals of sampling. Even if you understand sampling already, read our explanation of the process here. The viewpoint and terms used there are mirrored … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, Sample Rate Conversion | Leave a comment

Sampling in-depth

Here we lay the foundation. We’ll look at analog to digital conversion, and we’ll look at the spectrum of the resulting digital signal. We’ll use that knowledge to help understand the conversion process back to analog. Though we can build … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, Sampling Theory | Leave a comment

The bilinear z transform

The bilinear transform is the most popular method of converting analog filter prototypes in the s domain to the z domain so we can implement them as digital filters. The reason we are interested in these s domain filters is … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, Filters, IIR Filters | Leave a comment

The digital state variable filter

The digital state variable filter was described in Hal Chamberlin’s Musical Applications of Microprocessors. Derived by straight-forward replacement of components from the analog state variable fiter with digital counterparts, the digital state variable is a popular synthesizer filter, as was its … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, Filters, IIR Filters | 1 Comment

Biquads

One of the most-used filter forms is the biquad. A biquad is a second order (two poles and two zeros) IIR filter. It is high enough order to be useful on its own, and—because of coefficient sensitivities in higher order … Continue reading

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Pole-Zero placement

Here’s a Java applet that illustrates pole-zero placement. It lets you design a filter with two poles and two zeros, while showing the resulting frequency response and filter coefficients. It’s also handy for learning more about how poles and zeros … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, Filters, IIR Filters | 5 Comments