Topic: Why dither to 16bit?

[Evil Taper]

maybe it only does 24/96 files.  my r1 records at 24/44.1

[Gordon]

it does 24/48 for sure.  and I assume (don't feel like looking it up, it's late) it does 24/44.  personaly I see no reason to record at 24/44.

[Evil Taper]

Is there a firmware update for the r1?

[gewwang]

http://edirol.com/products/info/r1.html

Actually, the highest quality format is 24/44.1 in the R1 and the latest firmware is the one it ships with v1.0.3.

http://edirol.com/support/drivers.html#updates

[Evil Taper]

tis what i thought.  So, to burn an audio dvd i will now need to upsample to 96hrz, retrack and then burn that.  the one i did with the program doing the 44>96 conversion has track transition blips.

[BobW]

Bitdepth conversion is either a truncation (as in cut off) of the less significant bits (the ones that are quietest and usually always on) or a mathematical process used to interpolate and convert (digitally "compress") the waveform called dithering.
Noise can be added to make it sound better to the human ear.

The answer to your question is:
Truncated sources can sound harsh during quiet passages.

Some more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither
http://www.24bitfaq.org/  (an oldie, but a goodiie, thanks Heend, Kelleher, and  Nutter )

The more that you understand about this, the better your post-recording will be.
Dither to depths of 1 bit or less (0.2 to 0.7 bits), using the lower numbers when you are also applying noise-shaping.

[Brian Skalinder]

The question to which you keep coming back:

My bad.  So why would you want to use a dither that changes the sound of the recording?

The short answer...

Two factors in play with respect to changing the sound of the recording:

[1]  Dither
Dither is a destructive process, so it *must* change the sound of the recording.  ALL dither changes the sound of the recording.  We don't have a choice.  But there isn't a single, "right" way to dither.  Different dither schemes perform the process with different algorithm's - and that's why they sound different.  Just like different mics / pre / ADC have different sonic characteristics due to choices the designers made when they created them.

[2]  Noise Shaping
Noise shaping also changes the sound of the recording.  Although ALL dither introduces noise as part of its destructive process, we can "tweak" the noise produced.  Noise shaping is an attempt to shift the noise that dither creates into specific frequency ranges to which humans are less sensitive (typically higher frequencies, 15kHz - 22 kHz).

All your answers, ET, are...in the Archive!  I just yesterday posted a really excellent write-up on dither from iZotope, the makers of the Ozone plugin package (that includes dithering / noise shaping).  Check it out:

http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=51692.0