Extreme quantization of audio

1. What is quantization in audio?
2. What are the two types of quantization?
3. What causes quantization noise?
4. How many levels of quantization are there?

What is quantization in audio?

In digital music processing technology, quantization is the studio-software process of transforming performed musical notes, which may have some imprecision due to expressive performance, to an underlying musical representation that eliminates the imprecision.

What are the two types of quantization?

There are two types of Quantization - Uniform Quantization and Non-uniform Quantization. The type of quantization in which the quantization levels are uniformly spaced is termed as a Uniform Quantization.

What causes quantization noise?

Quantization noise is typically caused by small differences (mainly rounding errors) between the actual analog input voltage of the audio being sampled and the specific bit resolution of the analog-to-digital converter being used. This noise is nonlinear and signal dependent.

How many levels of quantization are there?

Though any number of quantization levels is possible, common word-lengths are 8-bit (256 levels), 16-bit (65,536 levels) and 24-bit (16.8 million levels).