Editing Analog-to-digital converter (section)

====Oversampling====
{{Main|Oversampling}}
For economy, signals are often sampled at the minimum rate required with the result that the quantization error introduced is [[white noise]] spread over the whole [[passband]] of the converter. If a signal is sampled at a rate much higher than the [[Nyquist rate]] and then [[Digital filter|digitally filtered]] to limit it to the signal bandwidth produces the following advantages:
* Oversampling can make it easier to realize analog anti-aliasing filters
* Improved [[audio bit depth]]
* Reduced noise, especially when [[noise shaping]] is employed in addition to oversampling.

Oversampling is typically used in audio frequency ADCs where the required sampling rate (typically 44.1 or 48&nbsp;kHz) is very low compared to the clock speed of typical transistor circuits (>1&nbsp;MHz). In this case, the performance of the ADC can be greatly increased at little or no cost. Furthermore, as any aliased signals are also typically out of band, aliasing can often be eliminated using very low cost filters.