It is sometimes desirable to connect the outputs of one or more delays in a network back into their own or each others' inputs. Instead of getting one or several echos of the original sound as in the simple example above, we can potentially get an infinite number of echos, each one feeding back into the network to engender yet others.
The simplest example of a recirculating network is the recirculating comb filter whose block diagram is shown in Figure 7.7. As with the earlier, simple comb filter, the input signal is sent down a delay line whose length is samples. Unlike the simple comb filter, the delay line's output is also inserted back in its input; the delay's input is now the sum of the original input and the delay output. The output is multiplied by a number before feeding it back into its input.
The time domain behavior of the recirculating comb filter is shown in Figure 7.8. Here we consider the effect of sending an impulse into the network. We get back the original impulse, plus a series of echos, each in turn samples after the previous one, and multiplied each time by the gain . In general, a delay network's output given an impulse as input is called the network's impulse response.
Note that we have chosen a gain that is less than one in absolute value. If we chose a gain greater than one (or less than -1), each echo would have a larger magnitude than the previous one. Instead of falling exponentially as they do in the figure, they would grow exponentially. A recirculating network whose output eventually falls toward zero after its input terminates is called stable; one whose output grows without bound is called unstable.
We can also analyse the recirculating comb filter in the frequency domain. The situation is now complicated enough that it is almost prohibitively hard to analyze using real sinusoids, and so we get the first real payoff for having introduced complex numbers, which greatly simplify the analysis.
If, as before, we feed the input with the signal,
A faster (but slightly less intuitive) method to get the same result is to
examine the recirculating network itself to yield an equation for , as follows.
Since we named the input and the output , the signal going
into the delay line is , and passing this through the delay line and
multiplier gives
Now we would like to make a graph of the frequency response (the gain as a
function of frequency) as
we did for non-recirculating comb filters in
Figure 7.6. This
again requires that we make a preliminary picture in the complex plane. We
would like to estimate the magnitude of equal to:
Figure 7.9 can be used to analyze how the frequency response
should
behave
qualitatively as a function of . The height and bandwidth of the peaks
both depend on . The maximum value that can attain is
when
The next important question is the bandwidth of the peaks in the frequency
response. So we would like to find a particular frequency, ,
giving rise to a value of that is, say, 3 decibels below the maximum.
To do this, we return to Figure 7.9, and try to find so that the
distance from the point 1 to the point
We do this by arranging for the imaginary part of to be roughly or its negative, making a nearly isosocles right triangle between the points 1, , and . (Here we're supposing that is at least 2/3 or so; otherwise this approximation isn't very good). The hypoteneuse of a right isococles triangle is always times the leg, and so the gain drops by that factor compared to its maximum.
We now make another approximation, that the imaginary part of
is approximately the angle in radians it cuts from the real axis:
As with the non-recirculating comb filter of section 7.3, the teeth of the comb are closer together for larger valuse of the delay . On the other hand, a delay of (the shortest possible) gets only one tooth (at zero frequency) below the Nyquist frequency (the next tooth, at , corresponds again to a frequency of zero by foldover).
So the recirculating comb filter with is just a low-pass filter. Delay networks with one-sample delays will be the basis for designing many other kinds of digital filters in chapter 8.