Circuit Response
every model has an edge, and the figure carries it
Generator

Group delay across the passband, at order 5

The Bessel filter's delay varies 0.1% below 0.8 of the corner; the Chebyshev's peaks near the band edge and is several times its low-frequency value. Every family here has the same half-power frequency, so this is a difference in behaviour rather than in scaling.
Group delay across the passband, at order 5The Bessel filter's delay varies 0.1% below 0.8 of the corner; the Chebyshev's peaks near the band edge and is several times its low-frequency value. Every family here has the same half-power frequency, so this is a difference in behaviour rather than in scaling.00.5011.521001kfrequency (hertz)group delay (milliseconds)ButterworthChebyshevBesselthe corner, 1.00 kHzsolved, then checked — −dφ/dω on the unwrapped phaseflat magnitude is not flat delay

Drawn above at its default parameters, which is almost never how an essay calls it. A placement states the numbers that essay is arguing about, so the figure a reader meets is about that argument rather than about the generator — 98% of the placements on this site pass one, and the phase that raised that number from 12% found eight captions describing a figure the page was not showing.

At those defaults the edge it states is flat magnitude is not flat delay — the right-hand slot of the caption strip, which on this site is never used for anything else, and which is read back out of the drawing above rather than out of the code that wrote it. It belongs to Filters, measured not tabulated, which is to say a change to it is a change to lib/figures/filters.js. It takes a slider on filter order with 7 settings, and every one of them has passed the same assertions as the frame above — a figure whose circuit stops doing what its caption says at any setting stops the build.

Called by 2 essays

which is the blast radius of changing it

Flat magnitude, unflat delay

A filter that passes every frequency in its band at the right amplitude and the wrong time has not passed the signal. Group delay is the measurement that says so, it is absent from the classical comparison, and it varies by fifty per cent across the passband of the two families everybody uses.

Filters, measured not tabulated

Flat delay, bought with more delay

An all-pass section has a magnitude of one at every frequency — measured here on a solved network as 1 to within 9 × 10⁻¹⁶ over six decades — which makes it the only thing that can change a filter's delay without touching its magnitude response. It flattens by adding. A fifth-order Chebyshev's 891 microseconds of delay variation comes down to 498, and everything leaves 722 microseconds later than it did.

Filters, measured not tabulated

Every generator