The response of a system to a "spike" input that abruptly rises from zero and then abruptly decays back to zero. The response of the system to any input can be predicted from the impulse response. The impulse response measured in a room also shows a series of echoes of the direct response, which are reflections from walls, etc. See the Signal Processing Section for more detail.
Response of the device to a digital impulse applied at the input. Typically used to characterize interpolation filters.
In essence, the way a particular device responds to an impulse. For example, the reverberation of a room can also be thought of as its impulse response. A great deal of information about a device can be determined by how it reacts to an impulse. The frequency response, phase response, and transient response are all tied to this specification, though this specification itself is rarely seen on a spec sheet.
A measure of the time domain response of a system, input-to-output, to a very brief transient signal at its input. The Fourier transform of this time-domain waveform is the frequency-domain transfer function. See: Transfer Function, Fourier Transform, FFT.
This is an output of a digital radio receiver which allows the time and voltage component of two or more transmissions working in a SFN to be compared.
The response of a system to an impulse as input signal. The output then produces the impulse response that is the time domain equivalent to the Frequency Response Function, FRF.
In simple terms, the impulse response of a system is its output when presented with a very brief signal, an impulse. While an impulse is a difficult concept to imagine, and an impossible thing in reality, it represents the limit case of a pulse made infinitely short in time while maintaining its area or integral (thus giving an infinitely high peak). While this is impossible in any real system, it is a useful concept as an idealization.