To Dither or Not To Dither, that is the question

[Dan Worley]

So if I use Ozone 4 to dither 24 bit down to 16 bit, then what?
I bounce to disc the file with bounce to disk set to 16 bit with DP dither off?

Yes. But you really don't have to worry whether Audio dither is on or off in that case because it's not active during bounces--even though the manual says it is. Now if you do a real-time mix with a plug-in dither active and export the resulting soundfile as 16-bit, then you would want to make sure Audio dither is off during the export. Though, again, my test show that it's not active during an export either, but from what I've read it should be.



c-ya,

Dan Worley

I would try your test with very quiet audio material, with soft verbs and decaying notes that decay down to 0 db etc..As , from what I understand, Dither doesn;t touch the higher volumes of data...just the lower bits, which is the soft stuff...
So make some piano VI's with decaying notes and lots of verb..real queit...and test those for Null...not a rock song

I used a mixture of sounds and tones and volumes -- piano being one of them. Plus, I crank the monitors. It's not that. Try it yourself so you don't have to take my word for it. I'd be interested in your results. One other person tested it and he got the same results as me. Complete null.

Watch out using certain plug-ins, though. Some don't react the same way twice. It's best to use tracks that are already mixed with reverb and delay and other effects and processes in order to rule out any plug-in variances.

c-ya,

Dan Worley

[OldTimey]

when working in 32bit Float...if you merge two 32-bit soundbites together to create another 32-bit soundbite, there really should be no dithering going on. You only "need" (whether you need it or not is arguable) dither when reducing word length.

so if you had a 32-bit Float file, that you ran thru effects, and then printed in realtime to a 24bitFixed file, i imagine DP's dither comes into play.

really, since all audio that goes into DP's mix engine is upsampled to 32-bit for summing and audioFX, when it gets printed to 24-bit there should be some dithering going on to smooth out aliasing from the conversion.

at least thats how i understand it. i could be wrong. Leave dither checked, no need to ever uncheck it.

the time to be careful with dither is when downsampling to 16-bit. the noise floor is high enough that if you dither more than once the added dither noise will be audible. If you don't dither you will hear aliasing artifacts on fades and quiet passages.