Revisiting Dither

[Phil O]

Dither in the Audio menu.

On or off?

When, and more importantly, why?

[FMiguelez]

Hi, Phil.

According to Magic D (and I corroborated this myself with tests in DP 9.52), you can just leave the Dither in the Audio menu always on and forget about it.

It ONLY applies dither when merging, freezing, or processing audio files offline.
It does not apply when we bounce files via the BTD command, so for bouncing we must do it as usual manually by setting a limiter at the end of the master fader with dither whose bit depth matches whatever you chose in the BTD dialog box (16 or 24 bits),

For exporting audio, I don't remember testing it, so I don't know if it applies there (probably not).

Also, I remember my tests revealed a bug regarding dither all across DP when working at 24 bits (Dither command in the menu and all DP plugins that offer it). DP ignores the setting and doesn't actually apply it! The resulting file comes out without dither! All other offered bit depths work as expected.

I tested this a few years ago, so IIRC, I merged and froze a test file with dither checked/unchecked, and at 24 bits they nulled completely . Working at 16 and 32bFP, the difference meter in the null test spat the dither only, as expected.

There's a DP plugin that offers all bit depths (7, 9 bits, etc). Same story here... all depths work except 24 bits. Same for MWLimiter.

We could settle this with finality if someone volunteers to reproduce (or falsify) my results with the same test mentioned above. It can be done quickly...

I'm curious if MOTU finally fixed this in DP 10 or DP 11...

[Phil O]

Thanks, FM. I vaguely remember you posting about this some time back. One of the reasons I wanted to revisit this topic is because I was watching one of Dan Worrall's videos and he mentions that dither doesn't make an audible difference at 24 bits. (So maybe DP's 24 bit omission in the dither scenario was intentional. I don't know.) He also says, "...you're rendering a 32 bit file which doesn't require dither."

Anyway, I thought I'd throw it out there and get people's thoughts.

Your friendly neighborhood Phil

[FMiguelez]

I LOVE Worall's videos!

Agreed. There is a difference between dithered/undithered audio at 24 bits (you can clearly see it way down in the meter in a null test), but we can not hear the tiny difference, so for all practical purposes, one could simply not do it and no one could ever tell by just listening (without blasting one's ears into hearing damage).

I tried it myself many times, and could not tell them apart at all. It was satisfyingly frustrating