Signal Quantization and Compression Exercises  
  1. Select 5 bits and the male sound. Play both the original and the quantized sounds when truncation, rounding, and sign magnitude truncation are used. Which quantization method leads to the best quality sound after quantization?


  2. Select 12 bits. For each sound signal (female, male), detemine the resulting SNR when rounding, truncation, or sign magnitude truncation is used. Collect the values into a table. Verify that the method of rounding leads to the highest SNR?  For the remainder of these exercises, we shall use rounding only.


  3. For every sound signal (female or male), what is the minimum number of bits that you feel is required to have a good quality sound for quantized signal? What are then the corresponding bit rates assuming that the signals are sampled at 8000 samples per second? What are the SNR in each case for the minimum number of bits that you chose? Are they all equal?


  4. For both male and female speech signals, complete a table with the SNR values that are obtained for quantization with 5,7,9,12 bits. Plot the numbers on the same graph, with one curve for the male and another for the female speaker. What do you notice? What improvement in terms of SNR can we expect from adding one bit in the quantizer?


  5. Consider again the male and the female speech signals and encode them with 5 bits. Notice that the quality is not good enough for a telephone conversation. Apply the mu-law companding technique and find for both signals the value of mu (from the ones available in the experiment) that maximizes the SNR. Is the quality of the new quantized signals acceptable?


  6. Consider again the female speech signal and quantize it with 2 bits without companding.  Can you see the quantization  levels on the plot? Explain why we hear some silences in the quantized signal.


  7. Choose 5 bits with truncation and listen to the quantized signal. Now, choose rounding and mu companding with mu=100. Listen again to the quantized signal and notice the difference.