I normalised...is all lost?

[soulstudios]

Originally Posted by Herb Utsmelz

So from reading and digesting this discussion, I can choose from these:

A) No one really knows how digital audio works.

Pretty much. Most audio engineers aren't computer scientists, and wouldn't know a hex value if it hit them in the eye with a rusty sponge.

Normalising a 32-bit float does the same "damage" ie. "change" as a volume change in a daw. Ditto 24bit, for all intents and purposes that are *actually audible*.

16-bit, some audible change. But not much really.

The question is more whether it is worth normalising - no, not normally.

The people who freak-the-****-out about it are the people who have only a rudimentary understanding of DSP. Oh, and don't forget placebo psychoaudial effects.
M

[dkatz42]

Originally Posted by peeder

BTW rather than padding a bit-shift with 0's I'd much rather they did so with random numbers. Less efficient certainly but we have the cycles. That doesn't accumulate noise, as the signal bits are left untouched, but it avoids distortion.

Um, random numbers *are* noise. Zeroes are pretty darned quiet. But I think we've beaten this one to death.

Dithering works because it adds (carefully-tailored) noise *below* the LSB of the sample, and that statistically pushes some of that information up into the length-reduced sample.

What I think you're missing is that while the random numbers aren't adding noise to the particular signal, they certainly *will* add noise to the overall mix, because those bits are significant on other channels, which makes it unlike dither.

I think the real issue is that if you take a quiet signal and boost the heck out of it, it'll sound increasingly like crap regardless.

[peeder]

Originally Posted by dkatz42

Um, random numbers *are* noise. Zeroes are pretty darned quiet. But I think we've beaten this one to death.

Dithering works because it adds (carefully-tailored) noise *below* the LSB of the sample, and that statistically pushes some of that information up into the length-reduced sample.

What I think you're missing is that while the random numbers aren't adding noise to the particular signal, they certainly *will* add noise to the overall mix, because those bits are significant on other channels, which makes it unlike dither.

I think the real issue is that if you take a quiet signal and boost the heck out of it, it'll sound increasingly like crap regardless.

Again I'd much rather have noise than zero padding, because there's no way you will notice the noise padding, but you sure can notice the distortion that can come from the zero-padded bit-shift. The "zeros" are not quiet when they have a one in front of them!

For the same reason as we dither, but this is not exactly like dither, since it's gain and not truncation.

It would be great to get an authentic DAW writer dude to contribute their time to gearslutz and clear a lot of these details up. Though they might be afraid that admitting there are some compromises in practical systems will fuel the analog zealots' jihad.

[Reptil]

wow it's Hitchcock and Brezhnev talking to each other about dithering.
cool


(nevermind me, I'm invisible LOL)