In an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) application, signal conditioning includes voltage or current limiting and anti-aliasing filtering.
Sensor inputs can be accelerometer, thermocouple, thermistor, resistance thermometer, strain gauge or bridge, and LVDT or RVDT.
For example, the 50 or 60 Hz AC power lines, present in most environments induce noise on signals that can cause interference if amplified.
[citation needed] For example, the output of an electronic temperature sensor, which is probably in the millivolts range is probably too low for an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to process directly.
It is often used to isolate possible sources of signal perturbations that could otherwise follow the electrical path from the sensor to the processing circuitry.
In some situations, it may be important to isolate the potentially expensive equipment used to process the signal after conditioning from the sensor.