An improved synthetic heterodyne demodulator circuit. The circuit is arranged to accept the output signal s(t) from an interferometric sensor with large amplitude sinusoidal phase modulation (phase-generated carrier). The phase modulation amplitude is adjusted such that a selected pair of odd and even carrier harmonics are equal. The quadrature signal components are first extracted from the phase-generated carrier using standard homodyne techniques. The quadrature signal components are then used to AM-modulate a pair of equal-amplitude quadrature carrier components at an arbitrary frequency .omega..sub.c, and summed. The result is a conventional PM modulated carrier which can be demodulated using standard FM techniques, followed by integration, to recover with high fidelity the sensed information.