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

An order-5 ladder driven from 2× the resistance it was designed between

computed by solving, not by drawing. A doubly-terminated Butterworth ladder is a two-port designed between two stated resistances, and the resistances are part of the design rather than the environment it happens to be used in. At match it loses 6.021 dB — exactly half the voltage — and its passband has no peak anywhere in it. Driving the same five reactances from 2× that resistance moves the shape by 2.345 dB and the insertion loss to 9.542 dB. The band inside which the shape is right to 0.5 dB runs 0.8857× to 1.1371× — a window of 25 per cent on a quantity usually written down as a round number. And the two sides are not alike: at twenty times the design resistance the departure has settled at 5.33 dB, while at a twentieth of it the passband is 15.51 dB out with 7.21 dB of peaking on it, so driving a ladder from too low an impedance is worse than driving it from too high a one.
An order-5 ladder driven from 2× the resistance it was designed betweencomputed by solving, not by drawing. A doubly-terminated Butterworth ladder is a two-port designed between two stated resistances, and the resistances are part of the design rather than the environment it happens to be used in. At match it loses 6.021 dB — exactly half the voltage — and its passband has no peak anywhere in it. Driving the same five reactances from 2× that resistance moves the shape by 2.345 dB and the insertion loss to 9.542 dB. The band inside which the shape is right to 0.5 dB runs 0.8857× to 1.1371× — a window of 25 per cent on a quantity usually written down as a round number. And the two sides are not alike: at twenty times the design resistance the departure has settled at 5.33 dB, while at a twentieth of it the passband is 15.51 dB out with 7.21 dB of peaking on it, so driving a ladder from too low an impedance is worse than driving it from too high a one.-20-100passband, each normalised to its own low frequency (decibels)the design, and this source resistance10m100m110100m110source resistance ÷ the resistance the ladder was designed forworst departure from the design shape (decibels)0.5 dB0.886×1.137×source resistance2 kΩ — 2× designinsertion loss, matched6.021 dB…here9.542 dBshape departure2.345 dBpeaking0.201 dBinside 0.5 dB from0.8857×…to1.1371×at a twentieth15.51 dBat twenty times5.33 dBsolved, then checked — one ladder, seven source resistancesthe shape survives 0.89× to 1.14×

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 the shape survives 0.89× to 1.14× — 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 source resistance ÷ the design value 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

The two resistors a ladder was designed between

A passive ladder filter is not a transfer function with some resistors attached; it is a two-port designed between two stated resistances, and the resistances are as much part of the design as the inductors. Driving an order-five Butterworth from anything outside 0.886 to 1.137 times its design resistance puts more than half a decibel of error on the passband — a tolerance tighter than the resistor is usually specified to — and the two sides of that window are not alike.

Filters, measured not tabulated

The termination an even order cannot have

Every even-order Chebyshev ladder terminates in 1.984056 times its source resistance at half a decibel of ripple, the same number at orders two, four, six and eight, and it is (√(1+ε²)+ε)² to a part in 10¹⁵. Building one between equal terminations instead — which is what a table of g-values and a matched pair gives — turns 0.5000 dB of ripple into 1.8123 at order four, deletes one of the passband maxima outright, and moves the worst tolerance corner from the 2.000 power of the component tolerance to the 1.109 power: a factor of 95 at one per cent parts.

Filters, measured not tabulated

Every generator