2.1 Pulse Code Modulation

A similar task in the context of digital communication is the digitization of speech. The most frequently employed principle is pulse code modulation (PCM). In PCM, speech is sampled 8000 times per second. Each of the samples is represented by 8 bits. So, one out of 256 values can be assigned to each sample.

The quantization error in PCM depends on the length of the sampling interval and the width of the quantization interval. Animation 2.1-1 shows the differences in the resulting quantization error.