twice dithered

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lopie

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if were not suppose to dither befor sending to mastering do we turn it off before burning cd -or if its 24 bit recording and we save as data file is ther dithering i think sonar dithers when recording "to enhance sound"

how do we avoid it and is it real important
 
If there's dithering going on at 24-bit, it's not going to be nearly the issue it would be at 16.

If you've got tracks that are individually dithered during recording, well, worse things could happen.

Rule of thumb - If it's there, it's there. If it's not, don't put it there until the last minute.

John Scrip - www.massivemastering.com
 
lopie said:
if were not suppose to dither befor sending to mastering do we turn it off before burning cd -or if its 24 bit recording and we save as data file is ther dithering i think sonar dithers when recording "to enhance sound"

how do we avoid it and is it real important
Click to expand...

When recording analog to digital, dither is used during the conversion to help prevent quantization distortion and should always be used. It's similar to tape bias in the analog world, where the tape is "excited" in order to help capture high frequencies. In the digital world it's used to randomly toggle the low order bit so that voltages that are "on the fence" between this bit being on or off are in a sense "excited" so that there is a low level noise (which the ear forgives more) than the kind of gating effect you would get if it where not applied.

If you are going from a 24 bit to a 16 bit wordlength I would apply dither to also help prevent quantization distortion. In the case of supplying a 24 bit mix on CD it's not needed since the files can be pulled in directly into a 24 bit DAW and processed as if it where part of a single 24 bit chain.
 
i have a question

if when you burn a 24 bit song down to cd in a program like soundforge doesn't it do automatic dithering?

if i use waves l2 limiter to dither from 24 to 16 would that overide the softwares automatic dither? if so, how does this work?
 
I like dither noise.

It sounds warm. And analog-y. Actually, I tend to dither every mix I make at least 3 to 4 times.

In fact, I have an entire CD of nothing but dither noise. I put it in my regular rotation along with Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest Moom, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, etc. etc.

I think it's great stuff. I could listen to it all freakin' day.
 
Re: i have a question

jugalo180 said:
if when you burn a 24 bit song down to cd in a program like soundforge doesn't it do automatic dithering?

if i use waves l2 limiter to dither from 24 to 16 would that overide the softwares automatic dither? if so, how does this work?
Click to expand...

When going from 24 bit to 16 bit without dither it's my understanding that 8 bits are truncated. As a result the least significant bit is subject to quantization distortion.

Although chessrock is being a bit cynical (I think) dithering more than once is not necessarily a bad thing. You just have to pick the appropriate spots. For example, if you are working on a DAW with a 24 bit bus, and you apply processing that works internally in 48 bits, it should be dithered before going back to 24 bits. That's why the Waves plugins include dither as part of each plugin and also why Pro Tools includes a dithered mixer.

Essentially, any time you are doing a word reduction you should dither. In my example above, when you are sending out a 24 bit mix, the mix will be imported in a DAW at 24 bit so there is no word reduction. The 16 bit mix on the other hand is coming from your DAW at 24 bit and then being stored on a 16 bit medium so dither should be used.
 
another question

if soundforge doesn't give you the option to skip dithering then it is truncating your 24bits to 16 right?

if i use a dither plugin like waves l2 before burning then that will give soundforge nothing to truncate right?

i've read some articles on cd architect, is this a better program to burn to disc with? if it includes a dithering option will this be the same, inferior, or superior to waves l2?
 
Re: another question

jugalo180 said:
if soundforge doesn't give you the option to skip dithering then it is truncating your 24bits to 16 right?
Click to expand...

Soundforge gives you the option to dither when you use the bit depth converter. If you just save the file as 16 bit I do not believe that it will apply dither by default. You may want to check with their tech support on this. In either case I would want to control the type of dither applied, so I would use the bit depth converter and save to a different file as 16 bit. (see notes below on why you may not want to save as 16bit).


if i use a dither plugin like waves l2 before burning then that will give soundforge nothing to truncate right?
Click to expand...

Good question.

Waves L2 give you the option to dither to 24 or 16 bit. If you use the L2 as the final process and save as 16 bit I believe that you should be OK. It would be really ugly programming if SF allowed the L2 to dither to 16 and then reconverted to 24 bit. But if it did the last 8 bits should all be 0's anyway assuming the L2 dithered properly and nothing of any significance would be lost when saving to 16 bit since the 0's would be truncated.


i've read some articles on cd architect, is this a better program to burn to disc with? if it includes a dithering option will this be the same, inferior, or superior to waves l2?
Click to expand...

CD arch is better because it allows you to create and modify a PQ list, as well as arrange the CD more easily than just burning with Sound Forge. I stopped using CD architect when they stopped support for it the first time it was released so I can't comment on it's dithering capability. If you are going to modify the files in CD arch (fades, volume, etc) I would reserve dither for there since the extra processing will affect the least significant bit.

In other words, use the L2 to dither to 24 bit (because of the internal 48 bit processing), save file as 24 bit, then import in CD arch as 24 and burn using their dither option to a 16 bit audio CD.
 
coool

thanks for a very well appreciated response. this clears a lot up for me.
 
CD Architect (whither to dither)

While we're on the subject of CD Architect, in the master fx chain, where should dithering take place? My gut reflex would be to put it last, but I'd be interested in any thoughts on this.

TIA
 
Re: CD Architect (whither to dither)

Ravenwing said:
While we're on the subject of CD Architect, in the master fx chain, where should dithering take place? My gut reflex would be to put it last, but I'd be interested in any thoughts on this.

TIA
Click to expand...

Definitely last if using it to decrease wordlength from 24 to 16 bit.
 
Dithering last in chain

Thanks, I thought it made sense.

Nate
 
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