Analog signals are continuous in time and amplitude, and digital signals are discrete in these two dimensions. Converting an analog signal into digital therefore implies two fundamental steps: sampling – the discretization of time – followed by quantization – the discretization of amplitude. A specific example would be the audio CD, which is sampled 44,100 times a second and quantized with 16 bits, rounding every sample to one of the 65,536 (2^16) possible values.
When performed pro…