"Garthrr" wrote in message

In article , "Arny Krueger"
writes:

"Garthrr" wrote in message


In article , Carey
Carlan writes:

The other bits provide 256 more possible levels between each of the
16- bits' levels.

Do you disagree with any of the above? It's just math.

GW
This the question I keep trying to get an answer to but after trying
a number of times over several years I have not gotten one. Its like
the question just bounces right off.

AK
It's doesn't bounce off everybody. I for one strongly affirm what
Carey said above. The relevant facts are very compelling to me. It's
simply how things work.

I guess what I'm trying to find out is whether others do not agree
with what Carey said--whether this is in contention or not.

On Usenet, *anything* can be in contention! ;-)

From something I just read I'm beginning to think that dither is
somehow responsible for negating the advantage of that extra
resolution at least in higher level signals.

Not if dither is used correctly, and these days it often is used correctly.

Usually, dither is sized to match the actual size of the smallest
quantization step. This number has to be chosen carefully because the
smallest step being quantized by just about all 24-bit converters isn't the
theoretical 1 sixteen-millionth of full scale. It's something vastly bigger,
and it varies quit a bit from converter to converter. But the education
process has worked and most chip designers know about this.

Dither makes the size of the quantization steps much more sonically
palatable, no matter how big or small they are.

From the standpoint of technical accuracy, dither doesn't negate any
advantages, and it doesn't level any playing fields.

These days, *everybody* uses dither in their quantizers, and IME *everybody*
makes pretty good use of it. However a converter with a relatively coarse
step size is still going to be noisier than one that has a smaller step
size.