Waves of sound travel with a velocity of approximately = 345 meters / second in air.
The propagation of sound over a distance thus involves a time delay of seconds.
Figure 10:
A digital delay line of length .
A digital delay line, as represented in Fig. 10, is defined by the difference equation
where the input signal
for , is the output signal and is the delay length in samples.
Thus, a digital delay line can be interpreted as a discrete-time physical model of traveling-wave propagation over a distance , where
is the number of discrete-time samples corresponding to a distance at a sample rate .