Companding
In telecommunications and signal processing, companding (occasionally called compansion) is a method of mitigating the detrimental effects of a channel with limited dynamic range. The name is a portmanteau of the words compressing and expanding, which are the functions of a compander at the transmitting and receiving ends, respectively. The use of companding allows signals with a large dynamic range to be transmitted over facilities that have a smaller dynamic range capability. Companding is employed in telephony and other audio applications such as professional wireless microphones and analog recording. How it works The dynamic range of a signal is compressed before transmission and is expanded to the original value at the receiver. The electronic circuit that does this is called a compander and works by compressing or expanding the dynamic range of an analog electronic signal such as sound recorded by a microphone. One variety is a triplet of amplifiers: a logarithmic a ...
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A-law
An A-law algorithm is a standard companding algorithm, used in European 8-bit PCM digital communications systems to optimize, i.e. modify, the dynamic range of an analog signal for digitizing. It is one of the two companding algorithms in the G.711 standard from ITU-T, the other being the similar μ-law, used in North America and Japan. For a given input x, the equation for A-law encoding is as follows: F(x) = \sgn(x) \begin \dfrac, & , x, < \dfrac, \\ ex \dfrac, & \dfrac \leq , x, \leq 1, \end where $A$ is the compression parameter. In Europe, $A\; =\; 87.6$. A-law expansion is given by the inverse function: The reason for this encoding is that the wide