Practical Audio Electronics

5  |  Signal Characteristics

When building and testing electronic circuits it can be very useful to gauge the performance of a particular design by sending test signals through the circuit and performing measurements on the resulting output waveform. The simplest measurements take the form of a single number, perhaps showing the average voltage level or the frequency of the signal under examination. More elaborate measurements may be presented in graphical form.

Time Domain and Frequency Domain Representations

When it comes to visualising the information in a signal, two primary formats exist as illustrated in Figure 5.1. A time domain representation of a signal (Figure 5.1a) shows how the signal’s amplitude changes over time. This would ...