Subband adaptive filters have been proposed to avoid the drawbacks of slow convergence and high computational complexity associated with time domain adaptive filters. However, subband processing causes signal degradations due to aliasing effects and amplitude distortions. This problem is unavoidable due to further filtering operations in subbands. In this letter, the problems of aliasing effect and amplitude distortion are studied. Prototype filters which are optimized with respect to those properties are designed and their performances are compared. Moreover, the effect of the number of subbands, the oversampling factors and the length of the prototype filter are also studied. Using the multicriteria formulation, all Pareto optimums are sought via the nonlinear programming technique. We find that the prototype filter designed via the Kaiser window provides the best overall performance among the methods we studied. Also, there is a critical oversampling factor beyond which the improvement of performance is diminishing. Finally, if the length of the prototype filter increases with the number of subbands, an increase in the number of subbands will not deteriorate the performance.