An adaptive equalizer for amplitude-modulation (AM) signal received by over-the-air radio transmission comprises feed-forward finite-impulse-response (FIR) filtering and further comprises infinite-impulse-response (IIR) filtering for feeding back decisions. The echo content of baseband signal demodulated from the AM signal is measured for initially determining the reception channel impulse response (CIR) in the time-domain. Thereafter, the CIR is updated by decision feedback. Periodically, the CIR is normalized with respect to the strength of a cursor component thereof. The strengths of longer-delay post-echoes in the normalized CIR are used to determine the weighting coefficients of the IIR filtering, which suppresses the longer-delay post-echoes. The pre-echo and short-delay post-echo portion of the normalized CIR is convolved with the normalized CIR to generate a synthetic normalized CIR. The strengths of pre-echoes and short-delay post-echoes in the synthetic normalized CIR are used to determine the weighting coefficients of the feed-forward FIR filtering, which suppresses the pre-echoes and short-delay post-echoes.