[Nerdyrocker]

In my humble opinion, you want to get your hands on a dither that offers a couple different types of noise shaping. Lets think dither for a minute. Dither is the process of adding low leve noise to audio in order to prevent what is called "low level quantization error." This is a type of digital distortion that occurs when signals reach very low levels approaching the noise floor. The dither is applied to prevent these errors from occuring. Of course, this is raising our noise floor by a couple dB but you have to think, this is all happening around -90dB or so.

The "noise shaping" of a dither does just that. It shapes or pushes the noise to a more suitable location. For instance, Type 3 Noise Shaping on the POW-r dither plug-in pushes the noise way towards the upper frequencies in order for the noise to have less of an effect on the audio program. This is great for wide stereo images and complex program material. Type 2 Noise Shaping (to my ears) is a hair better for mixes that are intense in the low end (hip-hop, R+B, some pop/rock). Type 1 Noise Shaping, I have the most success with when doing work in mono.

The regular DigiRack dither sucks. The dither in Digital Performer is better used as a full blown white noise generator it is soooooooo bad. The IDR...well...I dunno...it just sounds weird to me.

Truncating is fun for rough mixes (quick and dirty) but remember kids, you should ALWAYS dither. For example, the Pro Tools TDM mixer actually runs at 48 bits with an 8 bit accumulator. Even if you record audio files at 16 bit, the mixer is running much higher than that, meaning you should dither.

And that my friends are the keys to dither success by the Nerdyrocker.

Does this help? Tech specs are cool, but really, just use your ears and make sure the mixes coming out of your DAW sound like what they sounded like inside the DAW.

Make Music.