Through investigating the phenomenon of amplitude–phase interaction, the authors present a detailed study on the propagation of signal with a sinusoidal envelope in dispersive systems. With respect to the pulse signal, the phase delay of the base‐band signal was previously defined to characterise the frequency tone delay in the base‐band signal spectrum. However, comparing the phase delay of the base‐band signal with the group delay has enabled the physical meaning of the group delay to be clarified. Of particular relevance, they observe that the frequency tone delay with frequency tends to zero in the spectrum of the base‐band signal, rather than the delay expected of a group of frequency tones. With this new definition in place, they developed a new method for the precise analysis of signal propagation, which importantly has a capacity to show details in relation to both the envelope distortion and the phase distortion of the carrier.