Patent US 4,747,144

An amplifier for acoustic signals provided with means for suppressing undesired acoustic feedback signals in a rapid manner. The amplifier includes a high-pass filter which separates a part of the signal to be amplified to obtain a control signal for reducing the gain of the amplifier when an acoustic feedback signal is detected. The output of the high-pass filter is connected to a periodicity detector, e.g. a single peak detector, which discriminates between an acoustic feedback signal having a regular periodicity and a signal having an irregular character, such as noise or speech. The control signal is derived from the output of the periodicity detector.