January 5, 2026
FFT Analysis with OpenTest
In audio and vibration testing, FFT analysis (Fast Fourier Transform) is one of the tools almost every engineer uses sooner or later:
- Loudspeaker frequency response
- Headphone distortion
- NVH diagnostics
- Structural resonance troubleshooting
- Production noise and “mysterious tone” hunting
A lot of practical questions are actually asking the same few things:
- Where is the energy concentrated in frequency?
- Is it dominated by one tone or a bunch of harmonics?
- How high is the noise floor?
- Are there any resonance peaks?
FFT is the most universal entry point to answer these questions.
This article will help you clarify three things from an engineering perspective:
- What FFT analysis is
- How FFT works conceptually
- How to use FFT correctly and efficiently in practice
What Is FFT?
In the time domain, a signal is just a waveform changing over time – all components “stacked together” in one trace. You can see it, but it’s hard to tell which frequencies are inside.
FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) decomposes a time-domain signal into a sum of sinusoids at different frequencies. In the frequency domain, the signal is represented by frequency + amplitude + phase. In simple terms:
- Time domain: how the signal moves over time
- Frequency domain: what frequency components it contains, which are strongest, and how they relate to each other
Historically, Fourier’s key idea (early 19th century) was that a complex periodic function can be expressed as a sum of sines and cosines. This evolved into the continuous-time Fourier transform, mapping signals onto a continuous frequency axis.
In the computer age, things changed: engineers work with sampled data and typically only have a finite-length record of N samples. That leads to the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform), which maps N time samples to N discrete frequency bins.
FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) is not a different transform. It is a family of algorithms that compute the exact same DFT much more efficiently:
- Direct DFT: complexity ~ O(N²)
- FFT: complexity ~ O(N log N)
The output X[k] is identical to the DFT result – FFT just gets there far faster by exploiting symmetry and divide-and-conquer.
What FFT Is Good at – and What It Isn’t
FFT is very good at:
- Finding deterministic narrowband components
- Fundamental tones, harmonics, switching frequencies, whistle tones, speed-related lines
- Looking at broadband distributions
- Noise floor, 1/f slopes, in-band power, SNR
- Characterizing system behavior
- Transfer functions, resonances / anti-resonances, coherence, delay estimation
- Serving as the foundation of time–frequency analysis
- STFT, spectrograms, etc.
FFT is not good at (or not sufficient on its own for):
- Strongly non-stationary signals and “instantaneous frequency”
- For chirps and rapidly changing content, you need STFT, wavelets, or other time–frequency methods, not a single FFT on a long record
- Separating two extremely close tones below your frequency resolution
- If the spacing is smaller than your bin resolution (set by N), no algorithm will magically resolve them
- Turning short data into “long measurements”
- Zero padding only interpolates the spectrum visually; it does not add new information
Before Using FFT: Key Concepts to Get Right
To use FFT well, you need to be confident about a few fundamentals:
- Sampling rate
- DFT and its interpretation
- What you actually plot (magnitude, amplitude, power, PSD)
- Windowing and spectral leakage
- Averaging
Sampling Rate: How High in Frequency You Can See
Before FFT, you already made one crucial decision: sampling. A continuous-time signal x(t) is turned into a discrete sequence x[n]=x(n/fs). The sampling rate fsf_sfs determines the highest frequency you can observe without aliasing: the Nyquist frequency, fs/2.
If the analog signal contains energy above fs/2, it does not disappear – it folds back into the band below Nyquist as aliasing. Once aliasing happens, FFT cannot “undo” it; the information is irretrievably mixed.
In practice, you must use an anti-alias filter before the ADC (or before any resampling) to suppress components above Nyquist.

Example: A 900 Hz sine sampled at fs=1 kHz will appear at 100 Hz in the discrete spectrum – a classic aliasing artifact.
DFT Computation and Interpretation
Given N samples x[0]..x[N−1], the DFT is defined as:

The inverse transform (IDFT) reconstructs the time signal:

Intuitively, X[k] tells you how strongly the signal correlates with a complex exponential at that bin’s frequency.
- The magnitude X[k] indicates “how much” of that frequency component exists
- The phase encodes time alignment relative to other components
What Are You Plotting? Magnitude, Amplitude, Power, PSD
From one set of FFT results X[k], you can create many different “spectra” that look similar but represent different physical quantities. This is where confusion between tools and platforms often arises.
Common variants include:
- Magnitude spectrum |X[k]|
- Units depend on normalization (e.g., “V·samples”)
- Useful for locating peaks, harmonics, and general spectral shape
- Amplitude spectrum
- Properly scaled magnitude, in physical units (e.g. V)
- Appropriate for reading off sinusoid amplitudes and doing calibrated measurements
- Power spectrum |X[k]|²
- Again, scaling dependent; often used for power/energy comparisons when conventions are fixed
- Power Spectral Density (PSD) Sxx(f)
- Units like V²/Hz or Pa²/Hz
- Used for noise analysis, band power, and comparisons across different FFT lengths
If you want to compare noise levels across different FFT sizes, windows, or tools, use PSD (or amplitude spectral density). Raw |X| or |X|² values are rarely directly comparable.
A Concrete Example: Two Tones in Time and Frequency
Imagine a signal consisting of two sinusoids at different frequencies.
- In the time domain, their sum may look like a “wobbly” waveform.
- In the frequency domain (FFT/PSD), you will see two distinct narrow peaks at the corresponding frequencies.

In OpenTest’s FFT analysis, you can visualise both the spectrum and PSD/ASD side by side, making it easy to:
- Identify tonal components
- Inspect noise distribution
- Compare different operating conditions on the same frequency grid
Try it yourself: Download the free OpenTest edition and run an FFT on a simple two-tone signal to see both peaks clearly separated.
Window Functions and Spectral Leakage: Cleaning Up Spectra
In theory, FFT assumes the sampled block contains an integer number of periods and is then repeated periodically. In reality, the record almost never lines up perfectly with an integer number of cycles. When you repeat that block, you get discontinuities at the boundaries, which causes energy to spread into neighboring bins — this is spectral leakage.
To reduce leakage, we typically apply a window function to the time record before doing FFT. A window simultaneously affects:
- Main lobe width
- Wider main lobe = peaks get broader → it’s harder to separate close tones
- Side lobe height
- Lower side lobes = easier to see small peaks near a large one (better dynamic range)
- Amplitude/energy scaling
- Windows change the relationship between a pure tone’s true amplitude and the observed peak, as well as the noise floor level
Some practical guidelines:
- Rectangular window
- Only use when you can ensure coherent sampling (an integer number of periods in the record) and you want the narrowest possible main lobe
- Hanning (Hann) window
- A very robust default choice for general acoustics and vibration work
- Widely used with Welch/PSD methods
- Hamming
- Similar to Hann, with slightly different side-lobe behavior, common in communications
- Blackman / Blackman–Harris
- Lower side lobes, useful when you need to see small peaks next to big ones, at the cost of a wider main lobe

In OpenTest, you can switch between different window functions in the FFT analysis module and immediately see the impact on peak width, side lobes, and noise floor.
Averaging: Making Spectra More Stable
For noisy or non-stationary signals, a single FFT can look very “spiky” or unstable. By averaging multiple spectra, you obtain a smoother, more repeatable result. Common averaging types include:
- Linear averaging
- A simple arithmetic mean of several FFT results
- Exponential averaging
- Recent data gets more weight; good for live monitoring when the spectrum should react but not jump wildly
- Energy (power) averaging
- Based on power; ensures power-related quantities remain consistent
A good averaging configuration strikes a balance between suppressing random fluctuations and preserving genuine changes in the signal.
Where Do We Use FFT in Practice?
Audio and Acoustics
Typical applications include:
- Finding feedback frequencies, harmonic distortion, and device noise floors
- Frequency response (transfer function) measurement
- Room modes / resonance analysis
- Spectrograms of speech, music, and equipment noise
In audio/acoustics, you must be clear about units and conventions:
- dB SPL, A-weighting, 1/3-octave bands, etc.
- FFT is the engine; the reporting convention (reference, weighting, bandwidth) must be clearly defined.
Vibration and Rotating Machinery
- Identifying speed-related peaks (1X, 2X, gear mesh frequencies)
- Structural resonances and mode behavior under different operating conditions
- Bearing diagnostics, gear whine, imbalance, misalignment
For bearing and gearbox analysis, envelope detection/demodulation is often used:
- Band-pass filter the signal
- Demodulate and then perform FFT on the envelope to reveal fault frequencies
If the rotational speed is changing, a simple FFT will “smear” peaks. In that case, order tracking or synchronous resampling is more appropriate, turning the axis from “frequency” into “order”.
Power Electronics and Power Quality
- Line frequency harmonics (50/60 Hz and multiples), THD, ripple, switching spikes
- Pre-compliance EMI checks: spectral lines, noise floor, in-band power
In power systems, non-coherent sampling is a common issue: if the record length is not an integer number of mains cycles, leakage affects harmonic accuracy. Solutions include synchronous sampling, integer-cycle windows, or specialized harmonic analyzers.
RF and Communications (Baseband View)
- Modulated signal spectra and spectral masks
- OFDM and multi-carrier spectral analysis, adjacent channel leakage
Here, consistency is paramount:
- Same units
- Same bandwidth (RBW)
- Same window, detector, and averaging style
FFT itself is straightforward; turning it into comparable power measurements requires tightly defined settings.
Imaging and 2D Filtering
2D FFT extends the same idea to images:
- Edges correspond to high spatial frequencies; smooth areas to low frequencies
- Low-pass / high-pass filtering, removal of periodic noise, convolution acceleration in the frequency domain
The same periodic extension assumption now applies in 2D: discontinuities at image borders produce strong artifacts in the frequency domain. Padding, mirrored borders, or 2D windows are common ways to mitigate this.
Turning FFT into an Everyday Engineering Tool
From a mathematical standpoint, FFT is not particularly “lightweight”. But in engineering use, the goal is actually simple:
See what’s hidden inside the signal more clearly and much faster.
When you understand:
- What FFT really computes
- How sampling, windowing, scaling, and averaging affect the result
- When to use spectra vs PSD, and which settings matter for your use case
…then FFT stops being an abstract math topic and becomes a practical, everyday tool for acoustics and vibration work – from R&D and validation all the way to production testing.
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