For an improved neuro-spike representation of auditory signals within cochlea models, a new digital ARMA-type low-pass filter structure is proposed. It is compared to more conventional AR-type counterpart on a classification of biosonar echoes, in which echoes from various tree species insonified with a bat-like chirp call are converted to biologically plausible feature vectors. Next, parametric and non-parametric models of the class-conditional densities are built from the echo feature vectors. The models are deployed in single-shot and sequential-decision classification algorithms. The results indicate that the proposed ARMA filter structure offers an improved single-echo classification performance, which leads to faster sequential-decision making than its AR-type counterpart.