The paper describes in detail the statistical analysis used in a study of the degradation produced by imperfections in surface-acoustic-wave correlators. We consider the effect of errors in either one or both of the generator/detector pair when the input signal is either a single or a periodic m-sequence. A theoretical model, which incorporates taper, band limitation, random amplitude variations and spurious signal level, accounts for a large measure of the experimentally observed degradation of performance.