What is signal signal conditioning and why do you need it?

In electronics, signal conditioning means manipulating an analogue signal in such a way that it meets the requirements of the next stage for further processing. Most common use is in analog-to-digital converters.

In control engineering applications, it is common to have a sensing stage (which consists of a sensor), a signal conditioning stage (where usually amplification of the signal is done) and a processing stage (normally carried out by an ADC and a micro-controller). Operational amplifiers (op-amps) are commonly employed to carry out the amplification of the signal in the signal conditioning stage.

So, a signal conditioning circuit includes a logarithmic signal compression circuit for compressing wide dynamic range input signals to a dynamic range which is a predetermined portion of the dynamic range of an output utilization apparatus. There is provided, additionally, means for detecting the presence of the high level signals and superimposing a signal representative of the high level signals on the compressed signals to provide a combined output signal which, while compressed to the range of the output utilization apparatus, contains definable low level and high level signals from a wide dynamic range input signal.