The process of analog-to-digital conversion produces a digital signal.[6] The conversion process can be thought of as occurring in two steps:
sampling, which produces a continuous-valued discrete-time signal, and
quantization, which replaces each sample value with an approximation selected from a given discrete set (for example, by truncating or rounding).
An analog signal can be reconstructed after conversion to digital (down to the precision afforded by the quantization used), provided that the signal has negligible power in frequencies above the Nyquist limit and does not saturate the quantizer.
Common practical digital signals are represented as 8-bit (256 levels), 16-bit (65,536 levels), 24-bit (16.8 million levels), and 32-bit (4.3 billion levels) using pulse-code modulation where the number of quantization levels is not necessarily limited to powers of two. A floating point representation is used in many DSP applications.
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^Harris, Frederic J. (2004-05-24). "1.1". Multirate Signal Processing for Communication Systems. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. p. 2. ISBN0131465112.
^Vaseghi, Saeed V. (2009-03-02). "1.4". Advanced Digital Signal Processing and Noise Reduction (4 ed.). Chichester, West Suffix, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons. p. 23. ISBN978-0470754061.
^Diniz, Paulo S. R.; Eduardo A. B. da Silva; Sergio L. Netto (2010-09-13). "1.1". Digital Signal Processing: System Analysis and Design (2 ed.). New York & UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 5. ISBN978-0521887755.
^Manolakis, Dimitris G.; Vinay K. Ingle (2011-11-21). "1.1.1". Applied Digital Signal Processing: Theory and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 5. ISBN978-0521110020.
^Ingle, Vinay K.; John G. Proakis (2011-01-01). "1.1". Digital Signal Processing Using MATLAB (3 ed.). Stamford, CT: CL Engineering. p. 3. ISBN978-1111427375.