NAB - National Association of Broadcasters.
NCTA - National Cable Television Association.
nighttime mode - Name for Dolby Digital dynamic range compression feature to allow low-volume nighttime listening without losing legibility of dialog.
noise floor - The level of background noise in a signal or the level of noise introduced by equipment or storage media below which the signal can’t be isolated from the noise.
noise - Irrelevant, meaningless, or erroneous information added to a signal by the recording or transmission medium or by an encoding/decoding process. An advantage of digital formats over analog formats is that noise can be completely eliminated (although new noise may be introduced by compression).
NRZI - Non-return to zero, inverted. A method of coding binary data as waveform pulses. Each transition represents a one, while lack of a transition represents a run of zeros.
NTSC - National Television Systems Committee. A committee organized by the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) that developed commercial television broadcast standards for the United States. The group first established black-and-white TV standards in 1941, using a scanning system of 525 lines at 60 fields per second. The second committee standardized color enhancements using 525 lines at 59.94 fields per second. NTSC refers to the composite color-encoding system. The 525/59.94 scanning system (with a 3.58-MHz color subcarrier) is identified by the letter M, and is often incorrectly referred to as NTSC. The NTSC standard is also used in Canada, Japan, and other parts of the world. NTSC is facetiously referred to as meaning never the same color because of the system’s difficulty in maintaining color consistency.
NTSC-4.43 - A variation of NTSC where a 525/59.94 signal is encoded using the PAL subcarrier frequency and chroma modulation. Also called 60-Hz PAL.
numerical aperture (NA) - A unitless measure of the ability of a lens to gather and focus light. NA = n sin θ, where θ is the angle of the light as it narrows to the focal point. A numerical aperture of 1 implies no change in parallel light beams. The higher the number, the greater the focusing power and the smaller the spot.
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