Optimal trade-off between oversampling and filter length

1. What is oversampling ratio?
2. Does oversampling cause aliasing?
3. What happens when you oversample a signal?
4. Is oversampling a signal bad?

What is oversampling ratio?

Oversampling Description

As a general guideline, oversampling the ADC by a factor of four provides one additional bit of resolution, or a 6 dB increase in dynamic range. Increasing the oversampling ratio (OSR) results in overall reduced noise and the DR improvement due to oversampling is ΔDR = 10log10 (OSR) in dB.

Does oversampling cause aliasing?

1.1 What is Oversampling? As per Nyquist sampling theorem, a signal must be sampled at a rate greater than twice its maximum frequency component in order to ensure unambiguous data. If the Nyquist criterion is not met, aliasing will occur.

What happens when you oversample a signal?

Oversampling reduces or completely gets rid of 3 forms of potential distortion a signal can have: aliasing, clipping, and quantization distortion. Although these forms of distortion are often mild and difficult to consciously hear, they're often noticed when using a lot of processing or pushing a processor harder.

Is oversampling a signal bad?

Oversampling compresses the signal bandwidth to a smaller part of the frequency axis, and can make subtle filters harder to design and implement because of this. You may, for example, need a filter that drops like a rock instead of something with a smaller slope, so you may need higher orders.