Tthe study quantization error is usually modelled as a uniform random variable and so while carrying on this you actually need to be very precised and accurate!!
Great article! Sometimes you have a fast ADC and a lot of time for a precision measurement. In 1989 we scrapped a whole board of high precision analog components on a Shuttle experiment which took 5 seconds to produce a single 12 bit digitization by supeimposing a precision sine wave on the DC raw data and summing 2048 samples from the 12bit ADC. We achieved 18 bit precision in one second. The accuracy was improved by intermingling precision references and board temperature measurements, and applying post processing corrections. (US Patent 4973914).
>A sound card, for example, relies on a sigma-delta converter that oversamples at up to 192 ksamples/sec.
Maybe just a typo, but of course, that isn't oversampling. Audio HW that samples at 192k does so to get 90kHz of BW. The actual sampling rate will likely be 128*192k = 24.576MHz.
Thanks, Nancy. Yes, before you think about digitizing analog signals you must know much about them. Unfortunately, some engineers jump in and specify data-acquisition equipment they later find doesn't give them the results they expect. Early in my career I made similar mistakes.
I really appreciated your explanation of quantization errors and possible solutions, as well as the trade-offs that are involved. It seems to me from reading your blog that an important first step of any project would be to have a very good understanding of the precision required so that one knows what effect quantization errors would have and how far one should go in attempting to reduce or eliminate them. Thanks for the great information, Jon!
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