1The ratio of the strength of an electrical or other signal carrying information to that of interference, generally expressed in decibels.
- Maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio requires high-sensitivity position detectors and low-noise electronics.
- The greatest challenge to the wavefront-coding system occurs when the object signal is very weak, resulting in a lower signal-to-noise ratio in the acquired image data.
- Also, by decreasing the microphone gain, any clipping that might otherwise occur as a result of the user speaking more loudly is avoided and the signal-to-noise ratio is not thereby decreased.
1.1 informal A measure of how much useful information there is in a system, such as the Internet, as a proportion of the entire contents.
- I'll go one further though, and say this about the practice: it's really damaging the signal-to-noise ratio of content I otherwise love.
- The idea seemed interesting, but the signal-to-noise ratio was awfully low.
- As we ponder what to do about the disinformation inundation, we must consider the fact that we are really dealing with the old broadcast engineering problem of signal-to-noise ratios.
For editors and proofreaders
Syllabification: sig·nal-to-noise ra·tio
Definition of signal-to-noise ratio in:
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed.