Most digital filters that are applied to audio signals use a “basic” building block called a “biquadratic filter” or “biquad” which consists of 2 feed-forward delays and 2 feed-back delays, each with its own output gain and a delay time of 1 sample. I’ve already talked a little about biquads in this posting, where I showed a couple of different ways to implement it. One of the standard ways is shown below in Figure 1.

The signal flow that I drew for Figure 1 is a little more modular than the way it’s normally shown, but that’s to keep things separate for the purposes of this discussion.

The two feed-forward delays add to the input signal (via gains b0, b1, and b2) and the result shows up at the red arrow. Remember from Part 1 that this portion of the biquad can only make a magnitude response that has (in an extreme case) infinitely deep, sharp dips, and smooth rounded peaks.

The signal from the red arrow onwards goes into the feed-back portion of the filter with two feed-back delays adding through gains -a1 and -a2. Again, remember from Part 1 that this portion of the biquad can make a magnitude response that has infinitely deep, sharp peaks, and smooth rounded dips.

Let’s say that we wanted to make a simple filter – let’s make it a low pass filter – using this biquad. How do we do it?

The simplest way is to cheat and go straight to the answer.

Cheating Option 1: You go to this page at www.earlevel.com and put in the parameters you’re interested in (Filter Type, sampling rate, Fc, Q, etc…) and copy-and-paste the resulting five gains (we’ll call them “coefficients” from now on).

Cheating Option 2: We search on the Interweb for the words “RBJ Audio Cookbook” and then spend some time copying, pasting, and porting the equations that Robert Bristow-Johnson bestowed upon us many years ago* into your processor. You then say “I want a low pass filter at 1000 Hz with a Q of 0.5, please” and the equations spit out the five coefficients that you seek.

However, if you cheat, you’ll never really get a grasp of how those coefficients work and what they’re really doing – and that’s where we’re headed in this little series of articles. So, you might decide to go through this series, and then cheat afterwards (that’s what I would recommend…)

Now, before you go any further, I’ll warn you – the whole purpose of this series is to give you an intuitive understanding. This means that there are things I’m going to (intentionally) skip over, merely mention in passing, or omit completely. So, if you already know what I’m talking about, there’s no point in reading what I’m writing – and there’s certainly no need to email me to remind me that I didn’t mention some aspect of this that you think is important, but I’ve decided is not. If you feel strongly about this, write your own blog.

P.S.

* Thanks, Robert!