In signal processing, a digital biquad filter is a second order recursive linear filter, containing two poles and two zeros. "Biquad" is an abbreviation of "biquadratic", which refers to the fact that in the Z domain, its transfer function is the ratio of two quadratic functions: The coefficients are often normalized such that a0 = 1: High-order infinite impulse response filters can be highly sensitive to quantization of their coefficients, and can easily become unstable.
In signal processing, group delay and phase delay are two related ways of describing how a signal's frequency components are delayed in time when passing through a linear time-invariant (LTI) system (such as a microphone, coaxial cable, amplifier, loudspeaker, telecommunications system, ethernet cable, digital filter, or analog filter). Phase delay describes the time shift of a sinusoidal component (a sine wave in steady state).
Distortion and overdrive are forms of audio signal processing used to alter the sound of amplified electric musical instruments, usually by increasing their gain, producing a "fuzzy", "growling", or "gritty" tone. Distortion is most commonly used with the electric guitar, but may also be used with other electric instruments such as electric bass, electric piano, synthesizer and Hammond organ. Guitarists playing electric blues originally obtained an overdriven sound by turning up their vacuum tube-powered guitar amplifiers to high volumes, which caused the signal to distort.
Linear filters process time-varying input signals to produce output signals, subject to the constraint of linearity. In most cases these linear filters are also time invariant (or shift invariant) in which case they can be analyzed exactly using LTI ("linear time-invariant") system theory revealing their transfer functions in the frequency domain and their impulse responses in the time domain. Real-time implementations of such linear signal processing filters in the time domain are inevitably causal, an additional constraint on their transfer functions.
Electronic filters are a type of signal processing filter in the form of electrical circuits. This article covers those filters consisting of lumped electronic components, as opposed to distributed-element filters. That is, using components and interconnections that, in analysis, can be considered to exist at a single point. These components can be in discrete packages or part of an integrated circuit. Electronic filters remove unwanted frequency components from the applied signal, enhance wanted ones, or both.
