Patent 7592941 was granted and assigned to Sony on September, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Disclosed herein is a signal processing apparatus including: analog-to-digital conversion means for performing delta sigma modulation of generating a digital signal having a predetermined sampling frequency and a predetermined quantization bit rate of one or more bits based on an input analog signal; signal processing means including a digital filter having a characteristic for outputting a digital signal having a sampling frequency n×Fs (Fs is a reference sampling frequency) and a quantization bit rate of a bits (a is a natural number greater than one) based on the above digital signal; and digital-to-analog conversion means including a part for performing delta sigma modulation for outputting a digital signal having a sampling frequency n×Fs and a quantization bit rate of b bits (b is a natural number greater than zero and less than a) based on a digital signal outputted from the signal processing means.