This study presents theoretical and experimental investigation on the length variation effect of the impulse response function (IRF) for the secondary path model in active noise control using an embedded control board. A narrowband sweep noise was the disturbance for control in a duct with the length of 1800 mm. The IRF model incorporated into an adaptive feedforward filtered-x LMS (FxLMS) algorithm was then analyzed in the variation of its length in terms of the mean square error, computation complexity, stability requirement, and attenuation performance before and after control. The FxLMS algorithm with various IRF lengths was implemented in a dSPACE DS1104 embedded control board for the real-time control. Finally the most reasonable IRF length, considering the computation complexity and performance, can be determined through the systematic investigation. The results in this study can be used for practical active noise control systems.