Tweet
Anyone remember what the physical meaning of third harmonic distortion is? For example, I believe, second harmonic is due to different amplitude gains on the top and bottom half of the waveform. I'm trying to figure out why a piece of electronic equipment has negligible (<100dB) distortion of any sort, except for third harmonic at -80 dB if I turn the gain up past a given point.
-
-
Differential inputs and push pull outputs tend to cancel second and other even order distortion.
The presence of a fractional index in a transfer function gives rise to a binomial series expansion that contains an infinite series of powers in decreasing amplitudes, the aforesaid circuit configurations tend to cancel the even order products and the odd order above the third get lost in the noise.
rcw -
Third (and higher odd order) indicates a symetrical error . . . clipping or amplitude compression being the most obvious example. A square wave (a clipped sine wave) is a sum of odd order harmonics.Comment
Comment