All About Dithering

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chater-La
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real informative...i like how its written 2, not like reading a lame textbook it actually sounds like someone explaining something .
 
moses said:
BTW, one of the best introduction I've heard is:
…one of the earliest [applications] of dither came in World War II. Airplane bombers used mechanical computers to perform navigation and bomb trajectory calculations. Curiously, these computers (boxes filled with hundreds of gears and cogs) performed more accurately when flying on board the aircraft, and less well on ground. Engineers realized that the vibration from the aircraft reduced the error from sticky moving parts. Instead of moving in short jerks, they moved more continuously. Small vibrating motors were built into the computers, and their vibration was called dither from the Middle English verb "didderen," meaning "to tremble." Today, when you tap a mechanical meter to increase its accuracy, you are applying dither, and modern dictionaries define dither as a highly nervous, confused, or agitated state. In minute quantities, dither successfully makes a digitization system a little more analog in the good sense of the word.
—Ken Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio
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Realllllllllllllllllllllllllly?

Ya learn something errday
 
Awesome article. Well written and alltogether informative

Never bothered too much with dithering, but I see there is some point now.
 
really? so ur saying not to dither... I've always left that checked ill see how it goes. thanks
 
dithering, bleh! Got better things to do with my time!
 
Nice... I just started using REASON 5 last year and im still learning it and I was very curious about what the hell a dithering was lol... thanks!!!! aka artiton
 
not to big on the whole technical aspect of dithering...but a fellow producer has shown me before and after projects using dithering techniques...and it did make quite a difference on quality overall...just pointing out that there are people that pull off some kind of sound magic using dithering specifially
 
thanks for the knowledge yall, this clears a lot up for me
 
with 32bit DAWs dithering is really only needed as the last stage when you go down to 16bit. interesting info, though.
 
all mastering is done by normal ears .. if sounds good it is good .. too much depth on this subject now as ive found out.
 
Dj-K9 said:
all mastering is done by normal ears .. if sounds good it is good .. too much depth on this subject now as ive found out.
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It definitely still takes experience. My first masters were awful!
cupwise said:
with 32bit DAWs dithering is really only needed as the last stage when you go down to 16bit. interesting info, though.
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this is exactly true. If you cake on one dither after another, the dither noise will eventually become audible and thus defeat the purpose of it.
 
Dithering is a pointless inconvenience in modern high gain music.
If you have a very spacious dynamic style then go ahead

 
Still shaky with my mastering, but I see some things I'll try
 
Dithering and noise shaping can make or break you final sound. Extremely important on mixdown.
 
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I would always dither, but I really wouldn't get too hung up on the type of dither, traingular pdf does the job just fine. Sure, on lots of audio the effect of dithering is inaudible. But I wouldn't want people listening with a decent pair of headphones to a recording of mine of say, a pianissimo flute decay in a quiet room, if I hadn't dithered when going from 24 bit to 16 bit - I think the distortion in that case would be audible.
 
I rarely use dither.

---------- Post added at 08:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:52 PM ----------

I need a top notch mastering program.
 
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