This paper investigates the soundness of porcelain insulators associated with the acoustic emission (AE) technique. The AE technique is a popular non-destructive method that measures and analyzes the burst energy that occurs mainly when a crack occurs in a high-frequency region. Typical AE methods require continuous monitoring with frequent sensor calibration. However, in this study, the AE technique excites a porcelain insulator using only an impact hammer, and it applies a high-pass filter to the signal frequency range measured only in the AE sensor by comparing the AE and the acceleration sensors. Next, the extracted time-domain signal is analyzed for the damage assessment. In normal signals, the duration is about 2ms, the area of the envelope is about 1,000, and the number of counts is about 20. In the damage signal, the duration exceeds 5ms, the area of the envelope is about 2,000, and the number of counts exceeds 40. In addition, various characteristics in the time and frequency domain for normal and damage cases are analyzed using the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Based on the results of the STFT analysis, the maximum energy of a normal specimen is less than 0.02, while in the case of the damage specimen, it exceeds 0.02. The extracted high-frequency components can present dynamic behavior of crack regions and eigenmodes of the isolated insulator parts, but the presence, size, and distribution of cracks can be predicted indirectly. In this regard, the characteristics of the surface crack region were derived in this study.