Resolution 250px|thumb|Fig. 1. An 8-level ADC coding scheme The resolution of the converter indicates the number of different, i.e. discrete, values it can produce over the allowed range of analog input values. Thus a particular resolution determines the magnitude of the quantization error and therefore determines the maximum possible signal-to-noise ratio for an ideal ADC without the use of oversampling. The input samples are usually stored electronically in binary form within the ADC, so the resolution is usually expressed as the audio bit depth. In consequence, the number of discrete values available is usually a power of two. For example, an ADC with a resolution of 8 bits can encode an analog input to one in 256 different levels (28 = 256). The values can represent the ranges from 0 to 255 (i.e. as unsigned integers) or from −128 to 127 (i.e. as signed integer), depending on the application.
Resolution 250px|thumb|Fig. 1. An 8-level ADC coding scheme The resolution of the converter indicates the number of different i.e. discrete, values it can produce over the allowed range of analog input values. Thus a particular resolution determines the magnitude of the quantization error and therefore determines the maximum possible signal-to-noise ratio for an ideal ADC without the use of oversampling. The input samples are usually stored electronically in binary form within the ADC, so the resolution is usually expressed as the audio bit depth. In consequence, the number of discrete values available is usually a power of two. For example, an ADC with a resolution of 8 bits can encode an analog input to one in 256 different levels (28 = 256). The values can represent the ranges from 0 to 255 (i.e. as unsigned integers) or from −128 to 127 (i.e. as signed integer), depending on the application.