[sdiy] Removing the effect of a DC blocking filter through DSP

[rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk]

Typical high-pass filtered squarewave that exhibits "sloping down 
towards zero" portions where it should be flat, ends up with concave 
regions if you high-pass filter it again in reverse.  As you said 
yourself, phase-shifts cancel out, magnitude changes double.

Imagine a squarewave minus it's fundamental frequency sinewave.  That's 
what it looks like ;-)

-Richie,



On 2022-12-12 13:01, Mattias Rickardsson wrote:
> Interesting problem, Didrik!
> 
> A quick spontaneous thought that I haven't even fully analysed yet,
> let alone tried out...
> 
> OK, so the typical DC-block droop makes the flat parts of a signal
> become droopy, as everything decays towards zero. But what would
> happen if you'd send the signal once again through the filter, but
> time-reversed? I.e., turning a digital recording around in time, and
> then DC-block-filtering it again. Would it become less ugly, more
> clear, and perhaps even more correct-looking?
> 
> Thinking about it a second more... I guess the "phase errors"
> introduced by the first filtering would cancel out fully, since the
> same phase errors are introduced once again but with opposite sign
> (due to time reversal). In this respect I guess it would look like
> it's been FIR-filtered (symmetric behaviours in time domain, no
> asymmetric droops) instead of analog-/IIR-filtered. But the actual
> filtering in amplitude would become doubled, so if the DC-blocking is
> 1-pole, then the response is now 2-pole. Would it make it more useful
> in terms of understanding the looks of the signal?
> 
> Don't know if this helps at all! :-)
> 
> /mr
> 
> On Mon, 12 Dec 2022 at 11:11, Didrik Madheden via Synth-diy
> <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 11 Dec 2022 at 20:53, Gordonjcp <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote:
>>> Which console?
>>> 
>>> Why not just pick audio up directly from the output of the sound
>> chip?
>> 
>> It's the original Gameboy, and the quirk in question is that the
>> amplitude setting of one of the channels is sometimes glitchy
>> (called
>> "zombie mode" in the community) so what I needed to do was measure
>> amplitude levels fairly precisely. In the last couple of years
>> people
>> have started to reverse engineer the hardware from die shots, so now
>> we're validating theories of what the hardware should do in very
>> specific situations, theorized based on looking at reverse
>> engineered
>> schematics.
>> 
>> Right now I'm just inspecting the waveforms by eye, and the sloped
>> waveforms threw me off enough that I wasn't confident in my
>> readings.
>> 
>> It's a totally reasonable thing to do in my case to probe the signal
>> directly from the chip. The reason for not doing so initially was
>> pretty "analog". I don't have an oscilloscope at home and I didn't
>> feel like leaving home in the freezing weather on a Sunday to go to
>> a
>> lab that I have access to unless I really needed to. And I thought
>> the
>> question was sufficiently interesting to bring it up on this list,
>> in
>> case someone had any good advice, which of course people did.
>> 
>> In the end I did a really simple integration technique with hand
>> tuned
>> constants to correct the signal recorded from the soundcard, and
>> this
>> worked well enough to where I could read the waveform and extract
>> the
>> information I needed.
>> 
>> a=200000000
>> igain=.0000000000339
>> tmp=0
>> 
>> for i in range(len(samples_in)):
>> samp_in=samples_in[i]
>> tmp+=samp_in*a
>> samples_out[i]=samp_in+tmp*igain
>> 
>> --
>> /Didrik
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