Distortion Analysis Toolkit--A Software Tool for Easy Analysis of Nonlinear Audio Systems

Several audio effects devices deliberately add nonlinear distortion to the processed signal in order to create a desired sound. When creating virtual analog models of nonlinearly distorting devices, it would be very useful to carefully analyze the type of distortion, so that the model could be made...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEURASIP journal on advances in signal processing Vol. 2010; no. 1; p. 617325
Main Author Pakarinen, Jyri
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer Nature B.V 01.01.2010
BioMed Central Ltd
SpringerOpen
Subjects
Batch processing
Design
Signal processing
Software
Studies
Syntax
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Summary:Several audio effects devices deliberately add nonlinear distortion to the processed signal in order to create a desired sound. When creating virtual analog models of nonlinearly distorting devices, it would be very useful to carefully analyze the type of distortion, so that the model could be made as realistic as possible. While traditional system analysis tools such as the frequency response give detailed information on the operation of linear and time-invariant systems, they are less useful for analyzing nonlinear devices. Furthermore, although there do exist separate algorithms for nonlinear distortion analysis, there is currently no unified, easy-to-use tool for rapid analysis of distorting audio systems. This paper offers a remedy by introducing a new software tool for easy analysis of distorting effects. A comparison between a well-known guitar tube amplifier and two commercial software simulations is presented as a case study. This freely available software is written in Matlab language, but the analysis tool can also run as a standalone program, so the user does not need to have Matlab installed in order to perform the analysis.
ISSN:1687-6172
1687-6180
1687-6180
DOI:10.1186/1687-6180-2010-617325