Group Delay and Phase Delay

Group Delay And Phase Delay

In signal processing, group delay is a measure of the time delay of the amplitude envelopes of the various sinusoidal components of a signal through a device under test, and is a function of frequency for each component. Phase delay is a similar measure of the time delay of the phase, instead of the delay of the amplitude envelope, of each sinusoidal component.

All frequency components of a signal are delayed when passed through a device such as an amplifier, a loudspeaker, or propagating through space or a medium, such as air. This signal delay will be different for the various frequencies unless the device has the property of being linear phase. (Linear phase and minimum phase are often confused. They are quite different.) The delay variation means that signals consisting of multiple frequency components will suffer distortion because these components are not delayed by the same amount of time at the output of the device. This changes the shape of the signal in addition to any constant delay or scale change. A sufficiently large delay variation can cause problems such as poor fidelity in audio or intersymbol interference (ISI) in the demodulation of digital information from an analog carrier signal. High speed modems use adaptive equalizers to compensate for non-constant group delay.