Differential Mode

The high volume module hardware has up to four input signal connections multiplexed to one analog-to-digital (ADC) converter.

Each input channel uses two wires connected to two hardware channels. The instrument measures the signal difference between the two wires.

This mode provides only two channels per ADC (versus four in single-ended mode), but generally offers a cleaner input signal to measure.

Differential Mode uses two signal connections for one signal to be measured, giving cleaner signals because of the differential measurement, and running twice as fast as Single Ended Mode because the ADC is timeshared between two signals instead of four, this also results in only half as many signal channels. For maximum speed, do away with the multiplexing altogether and just connect one input wire continuously to one ADC, eliminating the time lost to multiplexing and sharing, but ending up with only a quarter as many signal channels.