stage and does additional noise shaping in this stage the output of combiner 420 is sent to integrator 422 combiner 424 subtracts the feedback from the output of the second modulator stage from the output of integrator 422 and sends the result to integrator 426 the output from integrator 426 is sent to a 16 level quantizer 428 to be quantized the quantized value is sent through a delay stage 430 and the delayed value is fed back and subtracted by combiner 420 the quantization error is computed by combiner 432 sent to an amplifier 434 that has an adjustable gain u03b1 and then fed back to combiner 420 at the input of the second stage the inputs to digital error cancellation and decimation processor 436 are the output from the first modulator stage and the output from the second modulator stage the output from the first stage includes information about the input signal and the first stage quantization error the output from the second stage includes information about the estimated value of the first stage quantization error and a second stage quantization error based on known transfer characteristics about the two stages filter 436 is designed to cancel the first stage quantization error due to the additional noise shaping and multi bit quantization in the second stage the effect of the second stage quantization error is greatly attenuated thus the output of the sdm has relatively low error rate in this embodiment the quantizer in the first modulator stage is chosen to be a 3 level quantizer for better linearity during the digital to analog.