Sampling Jitter in Audio A/D Converters

This paper provides an overview of the effects of timing jitter in audio sampling
analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), i.e. PCM (conventional or Nyquist sampling)
ADCs and sigma-delta () ADCs. Jitter in a digital audio is often defined as short-
term fluctuations of the sampling instants of a digital signal from their ideal positions
in time. The influence of the jitter increases particularly with the improvements in
both resolution and sampling rate of today’s audio ADCs. At higher frequencies
of the input signals the sampling jitter becomes a dominant factor in limiting the
ADCs performance in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and dynamic range (DR).