should I dither ...

[nuisance sonore]

Thank's Ben, yes it does help a lot.

[IIRs]

Mics, Preamps, converters, soundcards, plug-ins, even electrical power, all have much more impact on the final product.

He's right.. don't worry obout what type of dither you use until everything else is spot on.

For 10 points: Master Fade Out before or after the dithering plug-in?

Before of course..

[djsubject]

For 10 points: Master Fade Out before or after the dithering plug-in?

Before of course..

Even if you use diffirent outputs for drums, bass, sounds, vox?

i normaly bus each ASIO output & drop one on each

Subject


EDIT; ok so thay are before the master bus

[IIRs]

The rule is: dither whenever the wordlength is reduced. If you bus some of your tracks to another output at 24 bit you should really dither at that stage too.. 24 bit truncation is a lot less damaging than 16 bit however, and I certainly don't think the flavour of dither is going to matter in this case.. like Beno says, if in doubt best just to enable dithering for all Tracktions outputs and not worry about it any further.

[djsubject]

wordlength is reduced. ????? some of us are selfe taught & not so hot with phrazes like wordlength, for me the T dither is not my fav choice allthough it dose do the job its intended to do perfictly!

Subject

[IIRs]

I'm self-taught too! Wordlength = Bit-depth basically. Sorry

[djsubject]

oh thanks that helped alot all though i have noticed the more bit depth you have the better the sound you can get

dose this mean if T2 had 128 bit depth it would sound even better than it dose?

[IIRs]

dose this mean if T2 had 128 bit depth it would sound even better than it dose?

yeah, our mixes would have much more "air" in them..



.. mainly 'cos our cpu's would crap out with a simple chorus plug! Minimalism anyone?

[hao nao]

well I'm glad I asked!

[IIRs]

I can't let a whole dither thread go by without quoting my favorite explanation: (copied from Bob Katz's book, in which it is credited to Mithat Konar.. whoever he is )

Here's a simple thought experiment that explains why dither is necessary and how it works. Lets create a basic A/D converter. We'll make it sensitive to DC and bipolar, so it responds to both positive and negative analogue inputs, and we'll give it a very big LSB threshold of 1 volt to make the numbers easy. We'll construct our ADC so that an analogue source over the range between 0.5 volts and 1.5 volts produces an output of 1, and so on. If, without applying any dither, we present a 0.25 volt DC (continuous) signal to the input of the ADC, the output of the ADC will be a string of zeros. In fact any signal between -0.5 and 0.5 volts will result in an ADC output of zero. Any information below the LSB threshold is completely lost.

Remove the 0.25 volt signal and apply dither to the input of the ADC in the form of a completely random signal (i.e.,noise) centred around 0 volts. Its peak amplitude randomly toggles the LSB of the ADC. The output of the ADC will be a stream of very small random values. However the average of all these values will be zero.

Now lets apply our 0.25 volt signal again (with the dither on). The two analogue voltages sum together, the dither and our signal. At each sample point (in time), the 0.25 value of our analogue source is added to the random dither value. The output stream wil again look like a stream of very small random numbers, but guess what? The AVERAGE of all those numbers will now be...you guessed it, 0.25. We have thus retained the information that was previously lost (even though its buried in "noise"). In other words, our resolution has improved. The conversion is still essentially random, but the presence of the 0.25 volt signal biases the randomness. Put another way, the characterization of the system with dither on is transformed from completely deterministic to one of statistical probability. The periodic alternation of the LSB between the states of 0 and 1 results in encoding a source value that is smaller than the LSB. In other words, on the average, the LSB puts out a few more ones than zeros because of our +0.25 volt signal. We say that dither exercises or toggles or modulates the LSB.

With the dither on, we can now change the input signal over a continous range and the average of the ADC will track it perfectly. An input signal of 0.371476 volts will have an average ADC output of (the binary equivalent of) 0.371476. The same will hold true of inputs going over the LSB threshold: an input of 3.22278 will have an average ADC output of 3.22278. So not only has the dither enhanced the resolution of the system to many decimal places, but it has also eliminated "stepping" quantisation effects!

well I'm glad I asked!

Bet you're regretting it now!

[djsubject]

Ahh now i get it Thanx Bob Kat

[hao nao]

well I'm glad I asked!

Bet you're regretting it now!

thanks, but I might wait till tomorrow to read that

[Beno]

For 10 points: Master Fade Out before or after the dithering plug-in?

Before of course..

Actually it was a bit of a trick question. You should do your master fade after you've bit reduced the file. If you do it before the dither, you won't fade to silence you'll fade to dither noise. Even though this noise should be 100% removed by trunction, its better to do it to the 16 bit file to guarentee you fade to silence. Although there are some arguments against this logic so...

Ben

[djsubject]

well before i saw bob katz info i would never have known that ben

thanx all for this usefull helpfull thread

its nice to understand why serten things help your mix even though you, (well I) cant directly here the difference

[IIRs]

For 10 points: Master Fade Out before or after the dithering plug-in?

Before of course..

Actually it was a bit of a trick question. You should do your master fade after you've bit reduced the file. If you do it before the dither, you won't fade to silence you'll fade to dither noise. Even though this noise should be 100% removed by trunction, its better to do it to the 16 bit file to guarentee you fade to silence. Although there are some arguments against this logic so...

Ben

Surely not! For the fade to be smooth, it would need to vanish into the dither noise: otherwise, the end of the fade out will be simply truncated, and will be quite audibly quantised.. I'm slightly confused actually: your earlier comment that using T's dither means you can use the master fade parameters would imply you also think the fade should come before the dither..