Compander

In telecommunication 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 combination of the words compressing and expanding. 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.

While the dynamic range compression used in audio recording and the like depends on a variable-gain amplifier, and so is a locally linear process (linear for short regions, but not globally), companding is non-linear and takes place in the same way at all points in time. 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 amplifier, followed by a variable-gain linear amplifier and an exponential amplifier. Such a triplet has the property that its output voltage is proportional to the input voltage raised to an adjustable power.

Companded quantization is the combination of three functional building blocks – namely, a (continuous-domain) signal dynamic range compressor, a limited-range uniform quantizer, and a (continuous-domain) signal dynamic range expander that inverts the compressor function. This type of quantization is frequently used in telephony systems.

In practice, companders are designed to operate according to relatively simple dynamic range compressor functions that are designed to be suitable for implementation using simple analog electronic circuits. The two most popular compander functions used for telecommunications are the A-law and μ-law functions.

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