Dynamic Range, Dithering and Noise Shaping

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…