Reply To: Dithering + bouncing confusion

Ok, now, after you made me unsecure, I did the test 8) …

2 things are really for sure:

1. Dithering is for sure overrated till it comes to recordings in natural rooms (especially recordings with noticeable ambient reverb of the room) with very high dynamic …

2. dithering is really nothing else than adding a dither noise to the audio to mask quantization correlation. This correlation, which occurs by downconverting a high resolution signal into a lower, forces the waveforms more and more into a rectangle form. The dither noise smoothes the stairs, which appears by the converting process and let you recognize the downconverted waveforms better like there were sounding before…

About the third point, does the plugin change the bit depth by itself, I was not sure, so I did following test:

I played a softsynth (IL Sytrus) in Reaper and added a bit meter (Schwa Bitter). Bit meter showed me 32 bits were used.

Now I loaded a limiter with dithering option to the signal.

The limiter works internally with 64 bits, so the bit meter showed my 64 used bits after inserting the limiter.

I activated the dither option (to 16 bit) and yes, you are right: the bit output dropped down to exactly 16bit.

I am pretty sure, even if you convert the bit depth 10 or 20 times in a song, you won´t hear any difference in 99% of all music.

But if you want to keep the full signal flow for your personal feeling, you should avoid using such dithering plugins before the final master.
I´ve tried other plugins with dithering options and some doesn´t have even an option to turn it off, so the maximum bit output of those plugins (f*ck Waves, this shall be studi standard…) was only 24 bits…

Again, I don´t think, that anybody on this world could really hear this, but to be safe, one should not use plugs like these in the “normal” signal flow…
I wasn´t aware of this, so thx for forcing me to test 😀

Trancit