Online Material: Tables of average amplitudes with standard deviation for the prominent phases in the receiver functions (RFs) produced from the synthetic seismograms. The receiver function (RF) method isolates the response of local structure from source complexity (the influence of the source and near-source structure) and the heterogeneity of deeper structures along the propagation path. The Ps -RF method is widely used to isolate Ps phases and reverberations ending in an S phase to determine the velocity structure of the crust (Burdick and Langston, 1977; Langston, 1977, 1979; Owens, 1987; Owens and Crosson, 1988; Ammon et al. , 1990; Ammon, 1991; Zhu and Kanamori, 2000; Langston and Hammer, 2001) and variation in depth to discontinuities of the mantle transition zone (Shearer, 1991; Gurrola et al. , 1994; Gurrola and Minster, 1998). The Sp -RF method primarily focuses on the interpretation of Sp precursors to estimate depths to the Moho and lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary (Phinney, 1964; Oreshin et al. , 2002; Vinnik et al. , 2004; Sodoudi et al. , 2006; Yuan et al. , 2006; Lekic and Fischer, 2014). In this study, five methods that are commonly used to compute RFs were evaluated using simplified synthetic seismograms: frequency-domain water-level deconvolution (FWLD; Langston, 1977), time-domain iterative deconvolution (TID; Ligorria and Ammon, 1999), frequency-domain iterative deconvolution (FID), matrix-inversion deconvolution (MID; Gurrola et al. , 1995), and log spectral deconvolution (LSD, Hansen and Dueker, 2009). The FID method is a new, hybrid method developed from the FWLD and TID methods. Synthetics were computed from a single layer over a half-space model to provide simple cases for which we knew the expected values. Because amplitudes are important in inferring velocity contrasts at interfaces, and arrival time is important to infer interface depths, we focused strictly on …