[Rwp] Dither and noise shaping

[Chris Belle]

Dithering is all about the edges, primarily the bottom edge of your 
dynamic range.

It's impossible to fit 24 bits in to 16 bits,
so they smooth it out with shaped noise, so you don't get quantizing
noise you know that ragged sound when you hear a long fade when it gets 
to the bottom close to dropping off, with 16 bit it's about 90 db.
sounds like crackle or fuzz, can hear that on bad old ;80s 16 bit reverb 
processors on long tails.

With 24 bit audio you have about 144 db,
theoretically,
but could you hear it with something like spoken word audio or music 
which doesn't have much at the bottom end, well, maybe, maybe not,
but this is the sonic equivalent of sawing off a piece of lumber to fit 
in a smaller place,
big piece to small piece, and then sand papering the rough edges,
or maybe a better analogy would be to put a smooth cloth over it so you 
don't get splinters in your hand 'grin'.
The most important time to use this is when you
have some sort of processing going on,
24 bit audio stands up to calculations and rounding errors much better 
than 16 bit does,
if; you really truly want to bullet proof your processing chain, ie, 
each successive dither or render, ramp your rendering up to 32 bit or 64 
bit floating point,
this takes a lot more space, but you'll have enormous headroom for all 
those processing calculations.


On 5/27/2016 9:38 PM, theoreomonster at reaperaccess.com wrote:
> According to those in the know, the short answer is yes.
>
>> On May 27, 2016, at 10:04 PM, Cleverson Casarin Uliana <clever97 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Should I enable dither and noise shaping when rendering a project to a 16 bit 44100 hz wave file? The manual says that such options are usually used to convert a 24 bit project to a 16 bit audio file, but they are disabled by default in the render dialog. Will I have better results enabling these?
>>
>> Greetings,
>> Cleverson
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