Principles of Digital Audio, Sixth Edition, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 18Sigma-Delta Conversion and Noise Shaping

Design limitations and the relative cost of PCM converter architectures encouraged the development of sigma-delta converters. These converters are characterized by short word lengths, very high oversampling rates, and noise shaping. They demonstrate that conversion can be performed either with a high-resolution quantizer at a low sampling rate (as in traditional converters), or with a low-resolution quantizer at a high sampling rate (as in sigma-delta converters). Sigma-delta analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analog (D/A) converters both use conversion methods such as sigma-delta modulation with noise shaping, and process high sampling-rate signals with oversampling and decimation filters. ...