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Quantisation: Turning a Continuous Waveform Into Integers

The second irreversible digitisation decision, and the amplitude counterpart to sampling rate. Rounding each sample to the nearest available level adds a noise floor of its own, which matters for any measure defined against quiet parts of the signal. Distinct from sampling rate: one discretises time, the other discretises amplitude.

Questions this Concept answers

Why does quantisation leave a noise floor that no later processing can remove?

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Bit Depth and Quantization in Digital Audio Engineering

Bit depth (resolution) is the number of binary digits used to represent each sampled amplitude value in digital audio, determining the number of discrete amplitude levels available (2^n) and thus the…