Avoiding clicks with changing biquad coefficients I have a DSP application that filters a signal with five cascaded biquads whose coefficients are determined by the Audio EQ Cookbook formulae (Thanks for this work, Mr. Bristow-Johnson btw). Each filter's coefficients can be changed individually via RS232 from a matlab app, however doing so produces audible click noises.

To prevent clicking, my first idea was to lowpass filter the individual coefficients to smoothen the transition. A friend of mine told me that this could cause instability. He is way more experienced in the field than I am, also I still lack the proficiency to prove/-disprove his claim or finding out which circumstances can cause instability in this case, so I take his word for granted.

However, his solution (Smoothing parameters instead and then calculating the correct coefficients) doesn't work for me. Calculating intermediate values in Matlab and transmitting them is not an option because of bandwidth constraints, calculating them on the DSP is not an option because of limited CPU time.

One solution would be to employ two parallel filters and crossfade between them. But I don't particularly like it, because it doubles my computational load, also two changes in rapid succession would lead to audible clicks anyways.

The next idea I had was to employ Gold-Rader structure (see below) for the biquad denominator. Since this structure uses the pole radius, which is always kept below 1 (as long as I filter it with a filter that doesn't overshoot...), it can't become unstable... except for the fact that the radius is multiplied with $sin(\phi)$ and $cos(\phi)$ before introduced in the signal flow graph. So if I'm transmitting the calculated products $r \cdot sin(\phi)$ and $r \cdot cos(\phi)$, I'm again not sure about how filtering those coefficients would affect stability. 

Each of the five biquads must be tunable across 20 Hz to 20 kHz, -18 to +18dB gain (where applicable) and a Q from 0.5 to 10 for the Peaks. The type of filter stays the same though (i.e. a highpass will always stay a bypass, a peak filter will always be a peak filter...).

So my question is: what is the most efficient way to avoid clicks while not risking instability of the filter?
Another possibility is to send the coefficients as poles and zeros and interpolate/smooth in the z-plane instead of the coefficient domain. This is always guaranteed to be stable. You can either interpolate in real/imaginary presentation or, if you want to get fancy, in magnitude and phase. The first one is a lot easier, since the phase interpolation has to handle wrap around.

Coefficient calculation from real and imaginary part is straight forward and suitable for real time. Only exception may be if you have a dual real pole/zero instead of a complex conjugated pair.