For actually implementing the example digital filter, we have only seen the difference equation
(from Eq.(3.1), diagrammed in Fig.3.1). While this structure, formally known as ``direct form I'', happens to be a good choice for digital comb filters, there are many other structures to consider in other situations. For example, it is often desirable, for numerical reasons, to implement low-pass, high-pass, and band-pass filters as series second-order sections. On the other hand, digital filters for simulating the vocal tract (for synthesized voice applications) are typically implemented as parallel second-order sections. (When the order is odd, there is one first-order section as well.) The coefficients of the first- and second-order filter sections may be calculated from the poles and zeros of the filter.
We will now illustrate the computation of a parallel second-order
realization of our example filter
. As discussed above in §3.11, this filter has five
poles and three zeros. We can use the partial fraction
expansion (PFE), described in §6.8, to expand the transfer
function into a sum of five first-order terms:
where, in the last step, complex-conjugate one-pole sections are
combined into real second-order sections. Also, numerical values are
given to four decimal places (so `
' is replaced by `
' in
the second line). In the following subsections, we will plot the
impulse responses and frequency responses of the first- and
second-order filter sections above.