Which of the following would allow a digital signal processing filter to create a sharper filter response?
Why A digital filter computes its output by multiplying a series of stored input samples by coefficients and summing them; each stored sample and coefficient pair is a tap. More taps means the filter has more degrees of freedom to shape the frequency response, giving steeper skirts and better stopband rejection, at the cost of more computation and more delay. Roughly, transition-band sharpness improves in proportion to filter length, so doubling the taps roughly halves the transition width.
Watch out Double-precision math improves numeric accuracy and reduces rounding noise, but it does not make the response steeper; a higher sample rate actually spreads the same number of taps over a wider bandwidth, which tends to make a filter less selective for a given passband.
Taps are like poles in an analog filter: more taps, steeper skirts.