A distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) o f an object, image, sound, waveform or other form

of information or representati on. Distortion is usually unwanted, and often many methods are employed to minim ize it in practice. In some fields, however, distortion may be desirable; such i s the case with electric guitar distortion. The addition of noise or other extraneous signals (hum, interference) is not con sidered to be distortion, though the effects of quantization distortion are some times considered noise. A quality measure that explicitly reflects both the nois e and the distortion is the Signal-to-noise-and-distortion (SINAD) ratio.