I've been doing some research on dithering and I'm still not clear.

I have Pro Tools 12.4 and I recently finished a song I wish to bounce to .wav. My last plugin on the mixbus was ozone and dithering is turned off. When I go to bounce to wav in Pro Tools it gives me the option to select 16 bit. I selected it and all seems fine, but I always hear how you are supposed to dither with a plugin. Maybe that is old news and the bounce in Pro Tools 12.4 takes care of it?

Thanks!

 

The process of dithering is mainly used when you requantize your song (eg: 24 bit to 16 bit). You lose a lot of data on the transfer (bit rate (24bit, 16bit, 8bit,... describes your dynamic range) and to blur this so called quantization noise, you use dithering! Dithering is also used on your AD/DA converter but that's another topic.

 

Maybe you should take a look at this guide from iZotope. Pages 28/29 describe the process in Pro Tools.

 

The dither added in the ProTools bounce is fine.

The dither with a plugin only comes into play if you want to audition the dither before the bounce. If this was 1988...

 

MBIT(+) is one of the best dithers available, and for the most part that guide is an interesting read, though there is some suspicious verbage on some of the early page in that manual that are just pure non-sense.

Just remember that dither in general is just meant to simulate a random noise floor and as such is going to be a very quiet hiss at best that most people will just never even notice. QED happens at the bottom of the Xbit range where if you think about the smallest wave you can reproduce is a 1 bit square wave, so by obfuscation you add noise above all these very quiet signals, of which there will be many if you truncate from 24 bits -> 16 bits. These are signals that are or bellow -90dBFS@16bits.

The dither covers up this very quiet distortion that lives on the edge of the resolvable bit rate for amplitude, it does not however effect frequency resolution, The tops of your sine waves above the least significant bits will never be smoother or less smooth because of dither.

 

Last edited: Jan 18, 2017

Hello.
There are a few nice reads, like izotope's "Dithering with Ozone".
Generally speaking, any processing at (conversion from) a higher bit depth (even internal, in a plugin - like using a 64bit internal processing, into a track recorded at lower bit depth) could use dithering.
Developers claim it improves linearity.
But, unless you get artifacts at very low volume, or applying the dithering obviously improves sound quality, I do not recommend using it. In most cases, it dulls the sound. Best dithering algorithm is ozone's mbit+, waves' idr is not that great. Keep in mind that not theoretical concepts matter, but the audible quality of the final sound. Every parameter, including those of dithering, have an impact on the tone and dynamics of the sound. So, every track calls for specific settings, to sound its best.

 

Last edited: Jan 18, 2017