Basically, your single impulse was generated digitally and sent through what type of D/A?
If it has an FIR oversampling filter (likely), it has become something very interesting by the time it has been through the amplifier, loudspeaker, microphone and A/D...
Here is a single impulse, 1 sample 44/16 at 0dBFS on the
world's first CD player, the
Sony CDP-101: (500us/div)
This is what a non-oversampled, analogue 9th order Tchebyscheff (brickwall) filter looks like on one of my actual CDP-101s (tested the other day actually). Looks rather familiar?
Just for fun, here's the 100Hz square wave response:
Here's a typical impulse from a OS player with excellent D/As and a superb measured performance (Marantz PMD-325 professional)- note scales are not the same so it looks better than it is. (1ms/div)
Zoomed just a little:
So, sending an impulse that looks like the one above through amp/speakers/microphone/A-D results in the top trace.
I put it to you all, what have we gained in 35 years?