And one step futher, but much more contemporary, is the Grace ANSR.
Were you running it, or no?
Do you want to further change that?
Interesting thought. I ran ANSR, quite a bit. I generally didn't edit those recordings in post, but I did on a few occasions. For some reason I thought ANSR is different from traditional dither, though I couldn't tell you why.
I think the answer is that the 16bit tapes have already gone through the inital A/D stage when they were recorded, so any information beyond 16 bits is already lost. Analog tapes have not been sampled yet and so can benefit from a better inital A/D conversion. Just a guess.
Exactly.
I'm struggling to reconcile the above with...
If you have a DAT master that is a good show you want to edit... you want to do all those edits in 24-bit. So the best way to get it there is out through a good DAC...
So if information beyond the original 16-bits is already lost, why transfer 16-bit DAT > DAC > ADC > 24-bit? If the additional information is already lost, converting to analog and then back to digital doesn't re-gain any of the lost information.
And if the point of converting back to analog (as has been suggested) is to avoid dithering twice (dither once when capturing the original 16-bit capture, then dithered again after editing)...isn't the dither noise in the 16-bit recording simply passing into the analog realm, then back into digital, i.e. doesn't the dither noise remain in the signal, so you're experiencing the effects of double-dithering regardless?
Additionally, if one's editing software uses 32bfp internal precision, then wouldn't going 16-bit > DAC > ADC > 24-bit still require two dither stages? Once to capture the 24-bit recording, and again dithering from 32bfp to one's target bit depth? So really, if we assume converting into the analog realm and then back to digital, is, in fact, better, shouldn't we go 16-bit > DAC > ADC > 32 bfp (or at whatever bit-depth our editing software uses internally)?
If the answer to going back into the analog realm is to leverage the sonic characteristics of the intermediate analog gear, that's one thing. But if it's to avoid double-dither, or some other issue, I'm still not grasping why it's better.