# 500 Hz high shelf

Lifts or drops everything above f0 by a fixed amount and leaves the bottom flat. Solved at 8 sample rates, with the poles, the real −3 dB point and the word length it stops working at.

Canonical page: https://makerportal.ai/lab/biquad/highshelf/500-hz
Page title: 500 Hz High shelf Biquad Coefficients — RBJ cookbook

This markdown document and the HTML page above are rendered from the same solved values at build time, by the same functions. Nothing here is written by a language model and nothing is fetched at request time.

## Key figures

- **Filter:** 500 Hz high-shelf filter — Q = 0.7071, gain +6 dB
- **Gain at f0 (500 Hz):** +3.00 dB — exact at every sample rate — the bilinear transform maps this value, not just the frequency
- **Pole radius at 48 kHz:** 0.9464891 — conjugate pair at ±3.15°, 0.0535 from the circle
- **−3 dB point:** 499.1 Hz — 0.998× f0 at Q = 0.7071
- **Peak of the magnitude response:** +6.00 dB at 24.00 kHz — evaluated on the unit circle, not sketched
- **Group delay at f0:** -0.000 ms
- **16-bit fixed point:** holds — largest pole 0.9465062 in Q2.13
- **Coefficients at 48 kHz:** b0 = 1.963489, b1 = -3.774118, b2 = 1.816361, a1 = -1.890111, a2 = 0.895842 — a0 normalised to 1

## Coefficients, at every sample rate

The cookbook computes w0 = 2πf0/Fs, so the same filter is a different set of numbers at every rate. Rates whose Nyquist limit is at or below 500 Hz are absent because the filter does not exist there — equivalently, the f₀/Nyquist column never reaches 100%. That is why this table is 8 rows and a 20 Hz page is 8.

| Sample rate | b0 | b1 | b2 | a1 | a2 | Pole r | f0/Nyquist |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 kHz | 1.815113 | -2.790025 | 1.135717 | -1.358219 | 0.519024 | 0.720433 | 12.5% |
| 16 kHz | 1.901894 | -3.360723 | 1.505307 | -1.672759 | 0.719238 | 0.848079 | 6.3% |
| 22.1 kHz | 1.926903 | -3.527660 | 1.626283 | -1.761652 | 0.787178 | 0.887230 | 4.5% |
| 32 kHz | 1.947831 | -3.668301 | 1.733027 | -1.835374 | 0.847931 | 0.920832 | 3.1% |
| 44.1 kHz | 1.960707 | -3.755285 | 1.801335 | -1.880415 | 0.887173 | 0.941899 | 2.3% |
| 48 kHz | 1.963489 | -3.774118 | 1.816361 | -1.890111 | 0.895842 | 0.946489 | 2.1% |
| 96 kHz | 1.979303 | -3.881540 | 1.903709 | -1.945011 | 0.946483 | 0.972874 | 1.0% |
| 192 kHz | 1.987266 | -3.935841 | 1.948948 | -1.972500 | 0.972873 | 0.986343 | 0.5% |

## What word length this filter survives

All five coefficients are rounded to one shared scale, which is what a q15/q31 biquad section does with its post-shift. Pole radius is solved from the quadratic, not taken as sqrt(|a2|) — once rounding pushes the poles onto the real axis those two disagree, and the convenient one reports a comfortable margin on a filter that has already left the unit circle.

| Word format | Q format | Largest pole | sqrt of abs(a2) says | Stable | Worst error in band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| float64 | — | 0.9464891 | 0.9464891 | yes | reference |
| float32 | — | 0.9464892 | 0.9464892 | yes | 0.0004 dB |
| 32-bit fixed | Q2.29 | 0.9464891 | 0.9464891 | yes | 0.0000 dB |
| 24-bit fixed | Q2.21 | 0.9464891 | 0.9464891 | yes | 0.0000 dB |
| 16-bit fixed | Q2.13 | 0.9465062 | 0.9465062 | yes | 0.0037 dB |

## Questions this page answers

### What are the biquad coefficients for a 500 Hz high-shelf filter at 48 kHz?

b0 = 1.963489, b1 = -3.774118, b2 = 1.816361, a1 = -1.890111, a2 = 0.895842, with a0 normalised to 1 — the RBJ Audio EQ Cookbook form at Q = 0.7071 and +6 dB of gain. Every other sample rate in the table above gives different numbers for the same filter, because w0 = 2πf0/Fs and every cosine and sine downstream of it moves.

### Is a 500 Hz high-shelf filter stable in 16-bit fixed point?

Yes. Rounding the five coefficients to a shared 2.13 scale leaves the largest pole at 0.9465062, against 0.9464891 exact, and the response drifts by at most 0.004 dB inside the band. 24-bit takes that to 0.0000 dB.

### Where is the real −3 dB point of a 500 Hz high-shelf filter?

499.1 Hz, which is 0.998× the 500 Hz corner. f0 and the −3 dB point are the same frequency only at Q = 1/√2; this page is designed at Q = 0.7071, and a shelf does not read Q at all — its slope is fixed at S = 1, matching Web Audio's BiquadFilterNode, so the gain sweep above is the family that moves this filter rather than a Q sweep.

### How close to the unit circle are the poles of a 500 Hz high-shelf filter?

0.9464891 at 48 kHz, as a conjugate pair at ±3.15°. Pole radius rises toward 1 as the corner frequency falls relative to the sample rate — the same filter at 192 kHz sits at 0.9863433 and at 8 kHz at 0.7204333. That distance is the whole story of the fixed-point table: a pole a few parts in 10⁵ from the circle has nowhere to be rounded to.

## Method and limits

Coefficients follow the RBJ Audio EQ Cookbook, the bilinear transform of the analog prototype prewarped so the corner lands exactly on f0 — which is why +3.00 dB at 500 Hz holds at every sample rate in the table rather than only at low f0/Fs. Shelves fix the slope at S = 1, matching Web Audio's BiquadFilterNode, so Q is not read for those two types. Pole and zero radii are the roots of the quadratic, not sqrt(|a2|). The fixed-point rows model a single shared coefficient scale and no other quantisation: they say nothing about signal-path headroom, limit cycles or the accumulator width your implementation uses, all of which can make a filter that passes this table still misbehave. Nothing on this page is fetched or estimated — it is solved from the type and the frequency in the URL.

## Related tool

[Biquad Filter Designer](https://makerportal.ai/lab/biquad-filter-designer) — Interactive RBJ-cookbook biquad designer — pick a type, corner, Q and gain and hear the filter while reading its coefficients, poles and magnitude response.

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Source: MakerPortal — https://makerportal.ai/lab/biquad/highshelf/500-hz. Free to quote and cite with attribution and a link to the canonical page.