Time domain analysis is used to determine whether A/D converters that employ higher order sigma-delta modulators, widely used in digital acoustic systems, have superior performance over classical synchronous A/D converters with modulators of first order when taking into account their important metrological property which is the magnitude of the quantization error. It is shown that the quantization errors of delta-sigma A/D converters with higher order modulators are exactly on the same level as for converters with a first order modulator.