Automatic Gain Control

Automatic gain control (AGC) is an adaptive system found in many electronic devices. The average output signal level is fed back to adjust the gain to an appropriate level for a range of input signal levels. For example, without AGC the sound emitted from an AM radio receiver would vary to an extreme extent from a weak to a strong signal; the AGC effectively reduces the volume if the signal is strong and raises it when it is weaker.

Famous quotes containing the words automatic, gain and/or control:

    Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching
    it lose
    And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up
    Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs
    James Dickey (b. 1923)

    The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
    Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)