Rounding
In some contexts, all the rounding methods above may be unsatisfactory. For example, suppose that y is an accurate measurement of an audio signal, which is being rounded to an integer q in order to reduce the storage or transmission costs. If y changes slowly with time, any of the rounding method above will result in q being completely constant for long intervals, separated by sudden jumps of ±1. When the q signal is played back, these steps will be heard as a very disagreeable noise, and any variations of the original signal between two integer values will be completely lost.