Practical Considerations

While the digital mass simulator has the desirable properties of the bilinear transform, it is also not perfect from a practical point of view: (1) There is a pole at half the sampling rate (). (2) There is a delay-free path from input to output.

The first problem can easily be circumvented by introducing a loss factor , moving the pole from to , where and . This is sometimes called the ``leaky integrator''.

The second problem arises when making loops of elements (e.g., a mass-spring chain which forms a loop). Since the individual elements have no delay from input to output, a loop of elements is not computable using standard signal processing methods. The solution proposed by Alfred Fettweis is known as ``wave digital filters,'' a topic taken up in §F.1.

---

Previous: Application of the Bilinear Transform
Next: Limitations of Lumped Element Digitization

Order a Hardcopy of Physical Audio Signal Processing

---

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.