Category Archives: Dither

Perspective on dither

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Nigel Redmon

Recently, I’ve had lengthy discussions on the topic of dither with a couple of different people—of opposite views. One believes that everything should be dithered, including truncations to 24-bit. The other feels that dither is a waste of time even … Continue reading →

Posted in Dither | 2 Comments

The sound of dither

Posted on November 7, 2010 by Nigel Redmon

Dithering is about spreading errors out, so that they aren’t related to the sampled signal. A constant background hiss is easier to ignore than tones that change depending on signal frequencies and amplitude. Here’s a fixed-frequency sine wave, truncated to … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital Audio, Dither | 3 Comments

What is dither?

Posted on October 20, 1996 by Nigel Redmon

To dither means to add noise to our audio signal. Yes, we add noise on purpose, and it is a good thing. How can adding noise be a good thing??!!! We add noise to make a trade. We trade a … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital Audio, Dither | 22 Comments

Digital audio: theory and reality

Posted on October 19, 1996 by Nigel Redmon

The promise of perfect audio—the Nyquist Theorem Most people who’ve look at digital audio before know about the Nyquist theorem—if you sample an analog signal at a rate of at least twice its highest frequency component, you can convert it … Continue reading →

Posted in Aliasing, Digital Audio, Dither, Jitter, Phase | 6 Comments