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You are truncating but as long as the dither for 16 bit has already been applied by the L3, this is fine. The important thing is that you don't do ANY processing of the signal after the dither. And that includes such innocent seeming things as changing the gain. (So for instance, your master fader needs to be at zero). The signal after the dither is applied is not allowed to change at all (not even a single bit) or you need to redither.
If you think about it, this all makes sense. Any dither plugin can only add something to the signal but (at least in most DAWs) can't actually change the bit depth of the signal itself. So that is how most dither plugins work: They just add the dither noise and it is up to the DAW (or the user) to do the actual truncating of the extra bits.
This is used at one of the studios I work at: The L2 in ProTools is set to 20 bit dither and the signal i sent out at 24 bits over AES to a Digi Beta that truncates the signal to 20 bits on tape. This works because no gain change or signal processing heppens between the 20 bit dither being added by the L2 and the truncation by the digi beta tape recorder.
Alistair
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