a high definition television system that is characterized by low transmission bandwidth is achieved by removing redundancies in the signal , encoding the remaining signals , and transmitting the encoded signal in a manner that is most compatible with the applicable standards . the dynamic range of the encoded signal is reduced by combining groups of adjacent samples that are smaller than a &# 34 ; floor &# 34 ; threshold to form larger samples , and by splitting samples that are larger than a &# 34 ; ceiling &# 34 ; threshold to form a plurality of smaller samples . encoding of the combined samples is carried out in a conforming manner to minimize deleterious effects of transmission noise .