Summary of Series/Parallel Filter Sections

In summary, we noted above the following general guidelines regarding series vs. parallel elementary-section implementations:

• Series sections are preferred when all sections contribute to the same passband, such as in a lowpass, highpass, bandpass, or bandstop filter.
• Parallel sections are usually preferred when the sections have disjoint passbands, such as a formant filter bank used in voice models. Another example would be the phase vocoder filter bank [21].

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written by Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.