A seismic observation array for strong motions was deployed to estimate seismic source, propagation path and local site effects in Tangshan, China. We compared site response from the S-wave inversion and those from other tech-niques, such as traditional direct spectral ratios of S waves and receiver-function of S waves. From the inversion, we found that S-wave quality factor, i.e. QS-value, is approximately satisfied with the relation of QS=67f 1.1 in the range of frequency from 0.5 Hz to 32 Hz and that the source spectra follow the w-2 model of seismic source for low fre-quencies less than about 12 Hz. From the comparison of site responses estimated by the different methods for each soil site, we found that all the methods can extract the same predominant peaks from the responses, the amplifications from direct S-wave spectral ratios are well correlated with those from the S-wave inversion within a factor of 2 to 3, while the correlation between the amplifications from S-wave receiver-function and those from the S-wave inversion is not good, especially for high frequencies more than 8 Hz. A seismic observation array for strong motions was deployed to estimate seismic source, propagation path and local site effects in Tangshan, China. We compared site response from the S-wave inversion and those from other tech-niques, such as traditional direct spectral ratios of S waves and receiver-function of S waves. From the inversion, we found that S-wave quality factor, ie QS-value, is approximately satisfied with the relation of QS = 67f 1.1 in the range of frequency from 0.5 Hz to 32 Hz and that the source spectra follow the w-2 model of seismic source for low fre-quencies less than about 12 Hz. From the comparison of site responses estimated by the different methods for each soil site, we found that all the methods can extract the same predominant peaks from the responses, the amplifications from direct S-wave spectral ratios are well correlated with those from the S-wave inversion within a factor of 2 to 3, while the correlation between the amplifications from S-wave receiver -function and those from the S-wave inversion is not good, especially for high frequencies more than 8 Hz.