Sv: [microsound] High sampling rates/Bit depths

[Jan Larsson <jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Actually you should use dither everywhere, not just when converting to
16-bit for the master. Even a simple volume change on a channel involve a
multiplication and subsequent reduction back to the bus-bitwidth - each and
every operation should be dithered (should be built into the software
architecture).

The effect of truncating many such operations and then mixing many such
channels together is not a happy one to my ears. In a well designed digital
mixing desk dithering use up 30-35% of all available processing power.

And floating-point based software is no different. In a 32-bit float the
audio is usually stored in the 24-bit mantissa. Most floating-point-based
software rely on the rounding errors inherent in floating point math to mask
their use of dither-less truncation. This probably works at least partially.
But these rounding errors are signal dependent and thus also add more
distortion. 

Commercial manufacturers like floating-point. It makes the software easier
to write (lowers development cost).

In my opinion audio quality is important for experimental music which often
involve complex structures/textures that cannot afford to lose to much
information/audible clues before it reaches the listener. This is the same
reason I prefer MP2 over MP3 on bitrates above 160kbps - MP2 make less
psycho-acoustic assumptions about the nature of the music and handles
complex music better (but MP2 is no good at rates below 160kbps).

/Jan Larsson



Den 04-09-19 11.31, skrev "derek holzer" <derek@xxxxxxx>:

> whole thing is, as has been mentioned already, to use a good dithering
> algorithm when converting from 24 or 32 bit to 16 bit without
> introducing any "artifacts". No dither, or a badly implemented one, can
> make it sound much worse than the original.



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