the distribution of the signal is no longer uniform, and the corresponding equation is instead Here, the quantization noise is once again assumed to be uniformly distributed. When the input signal has a high amplitude and a wide frequency spectrum this is the case. In this case a 16-bit ADC has a maximum signal-to-noise ratio of 98.09 dB. The 1.761 difference in signal-to-noise only occurs due to the signal being a full-scale sine wave instead of a triangle or sawtooth. For complex signals in high-resolution ADCs this is an accurate model. For low-resolution ADCs, low-level signals in high-resolution ADCs, and for simple waveforms the quantization noise is not uniformly distributed, making this model inaccurate. In these cases the quantization noise distribution is strongly affected by the exact amplitude of the signal. The calculations are relative to full-scale input. For smaller signals, the relative quantization distortion can be very large. To circumvent this issue, analog companding can be used, but this can introduce distortion. Design Granular distortion and overload distortion Often the design of a quantizer involves supporting only a limited range of possible output values and performing clipping to limit the output to this range whenever the input exceeds the supported range. The error introduced by this clipping is referred to as overload distortion. Within the extreme limits of the supported range, the amount of spacing between the selectable output values of a quantizer is referred to as its granularity, and the error introduced by this spacing is referred to as granular distortion. It is common for the design of a quantizer to involve determining the proper balance between granular distortion and overload distortion. For a given supported number of possible output values, reducing the average granular distortion may involve increasing the average overload distortion, and vice versa. A technique for controlling the amplitude of the signal (or, equivalently, the quantization step size ) to achieve the appropriate balance is the use of automatic gain control (AGC). However, in some quantizer designs, the concepts of granular error and overload error may not apply (e.g., for a quantizer with a limited range of input data or with a countably infinite set of selectable output values). Rate–distortion quantizer design A scalar quantizer, which performs a quantization operation, can ordinarily be decomposed into two stages: Classification A process that classifies the input signal range into non-overlapping intervals , by defining decision boundary values