Performance of adaptive Volterra equalizers on nonlinear magnetic recording channels

We examine the error rate performance of various equalizers on two nonlinear channel models which have been proposed recently in the literature: a partial erasure model and a Volterra model. We find that when the noise is appreciable the performance of the Volterra equalizer is only slightly better than that of a linear equalizer. Our results also demonstrate that write precompensation for transition shift elimination is to be preferred over post-compensation.