Chapter 2Quantization

U. Zölzer

Basic operations for analog‐to‐digital (AD) conversion of a continuous‐time signal are the sampling and quantization of yielding the quantized sequence (see Fig. 2.1). Before discussing AD/digital‐to‐analog (DA) conversion techniques and the choice of the sampling frequency in Chapter 3, we will introduce the quantization of the samples with a finite number of bits. The digitization of a sampled signal with continuous amplitude is called quantization. The effects of quantization, starting with the classical quantization model, are discussed in Section 2.1. In Section 2.2, dither techniques are presented which, for low‐level signals, linearize the process of quantization. In Section 2.3, spectral shaping of quantization errors is described. Section 2.4 deals with number representation for digital audio signals and their effects on algorithms.