Orders 1 to 5 on a fractional delay of 0.4 samples

Figure shows the amplitude responses of Lagrange interpolation, orders 1 through 5, for the case of implementing an interpolated delay line of length samples. In all cases the interpolator follows a delay line of appropriate length so that the interpolator coefficients operate over their central one-sample interval. Figure shows the corresponding phase delays. As discussed in §4.2.10, the amplitude response of every odd-order case is constrained to be zero at half the sampling rate when the delay is half-way between integers, which this example is near. As a result, the curves for the two even-order interpolators lie above the three odd-order interpolators at high frequencies in Fig.. It is also interesting to note that the 4th-order interpolator, while showing a wider ``pass band,'' exhibits more attenuation near half the sampling rate than the 2nd-order interpolator.

In the phase-delay plots of Fig., all cases are exact at frequency zero. At half the sampling rate they all give 5 samples of delay.

Note that all three odd-order phase delay curves look generally better in Fig. than both of the even-order phase delays. Recall from Fig. that the two even-order amplitude responses outperformed all three odd-order cases. This illustrates a basic trade-off between gain accuracy and delay accuracy. The even-order interpolators show generally less attenuation at high frequencies (because they are not constrained to approach a gain of zero at half the sampling rate for a half-sample delay), but they pay for that with a relatively inferior phase-delay performance at high frequencies.

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About the Author: 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.