Quote:
Originally Posted by Ethan Winer  Please do, and report what you find in this thread. The silence here and at Lynn's forum from those claiming that dither is critically important is deafening. 
If this is really true and a change is blatant, I can only imagine that something else unrelated is going on.
--Ethan |
OK, Ethan. Dither is NEVER that obvious until you discover later how you screwed up a master. But that does not mean it is not important!
There is someone on this board who poo-pooed my advocation of the use of a bitscope and possibly an RTA to examine the output of your DAW when you are working and mastering. His basic argument was: "If you can't hear it, then it's not important."
But the fact is that we mastering engineers work with unfamiliar material. Each day we get a new project. We very carefully listen to the source material and compare it to the result, but if the dither is incorrectly set it is not always intuitively obvious unless you turn it on, listen and then turn it off and say, "aha, there's a little loss in space and depth." To be honest, we don't have the time to make and prove by test listening on each and every job that we do something that we have already proved to ourselves time and again previously. So to that end, I recommend the visual aids, as protection against software bugs and human frailty.
How important is dithering? Around here I claim that I can hear a distinct difference in circumstances which you obviously are quite skeptical about. Frankly, that personal disagreement should not be important to either you or me!
If the theory (and in my opinion the practice) justifies good dithering practice, and people who you respect including leading psychoacoustic scientists feel that it is important, why should you be throwing a monkey wrench in the works to try to demonstrate how subtle (or inaudible at times) the phenomenon is? Of course it's subtle! We all know that. In many cases on the order of an audiophile difference, and in other cases there are people who claim to hear the difference in circumstances (such as the car) when it would be nearly impossible to pass a blind test even if their reactions are true.
I describe the sonic effects and when they are important and not important quite rationally in the second edition of my book.
Hope this helps,
BK