Equalizer (communications)

In telecommunication, equalization is the reversal of distortion incurred by a signal transmitted through a channel. Equalizers are used to render the frequency response—for instance of a telephone line—flat from end-to-end. When a channel has been equalized the frequency domain attributes of the signal at the input are faithfully reproduced at the output. Telephones, DSL lines and television cables use equalizers to prepare data signals for transmission.

Equalizers are critical to the successful operation of electronic systems such as analog broadcast television. In this application the actual waveform of the transmitted signal must be preserved, not just its frequency content. Equalizing filters must cancel out any group delay and phase delay between different frequency components.

Early telephone systems used equalization to correct for the reduced level of high frequencies in long cables, typically using Zobel networks. These kinds of equalizers can also be used to produce a circuit with a wider bandwidth than the standard telephone band of 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz. This was particularly useful for broadcasters who needed "music" quality, not "telephone" quality on landlines carrying program material. It is necessary to remove or cancel any loading coils in the line before equalization can be successful. Equalization was also applied to correct the response of the transducers, for example, a particular microphone might be more sensitive to low frequency sounds than to high frequency sounds, so an equalizer would be used to increase the volume of the higher frequencies (boost), and reduce the volume of the low frequency sounds (cut).

A similar approach to audio was taken with television landlines with two important additional complications. The first of these is that the television signal is a wide bandwidth covering many more octaves than an audio signal. A television equalizer consequently typically requires more filter sections than an audio equalizer. To keep this manageable, television equalizer sections were often combined into a single network using ladder topology to form a Cauer equalizer.

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