[sdiy] Best & fastest envelope follower schematic.. anybody ?

[Richie Burnett]

>... Like in a frequency shifter, you need to do phase shifters at each octave in your range, so it gets parts heavy fast. In the end, it’s probably not worth it. 

Surely it's only the bottom few octaves that cause a problem by causing excessive ripple with their outrageously long periods. (Envelope ripple with short periods can be removed easily with a gentle filter that still has a moderately fast response time.) So does the dome filter or Hilbert transform really have to conform over the entire audio range?

I must admit I have found the Hilbert transform useful for finding the envelope of an amplitude modulated sinusoidal carrier, but it doesn't necessarily give you the "envelope" you expect when fed with signals that are spectrally more complex.

-Richie,