This paper pertains to speech and acoustic signal processing, and particularly to a determination of echo path delay and operation of echo cancellers. To cancel long echoes, the number of weights in a conventional adaptive filter must be large. The length of the adaptive filter will directly affect both the degree of accuracy and the convergence speed of the adaptation process. We present a new adaptive structure which is capable to deal with multiple dispersive echo paths. An adaptive filter according to the present invention includes means for storing an impulse response in a memory, the impulse response being indicative of the characteristics of a transmission line. It also includes a delay estimator for detecting ranges of samples within the impulse response having relatively large distribution of echo energy. These ranges of samples are being indicative of echoes on the transmission line. An adaptive filter has a plurality of weighted taps, each of the weighted taps having an associated tap weight value. A tap allocation/control circuit establishes the tap weight values in response to said detecting means so that only taps within the regions of relatively large distributions of echo energy are turned on. Thus, the convergence speed and the degree of estimation in the adaptation process can be improved
