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Arny Krueger
 
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Default 16 bit vs 24 bit, 44.1khz vs 48 khz <-- please explain

"Garthrr" wrote in message

In article ,
Jay - atldigi writes:

The transfer function really does become linear with dither, at the
expense of a noise floor.


Ok, there's another important piece of the puzzle (at least for me).
So if I understand correctly, its a situation where what would seem
to be ideal on paper is problematic as far as implementation because
of the side effects of distortion and aliasing. So dither cures these
problems at the expense of the noise floor by somehow either
correcting the quantization error or rendering it harmless.


Dither clearly doesn't correct quantization error. Dither does change
quantization error into something that is sonically more benign. What dither
does is sort of like turning sewage into beer. The sewage hasn't been
exactly been turned into chemically pure water. But, the sewage has been
turned into beer, which is something that is more palatable to most of us
than sewage.

So what
would be stairstep errors in voltage are smoothed over by dither and
thus the resolution of the system in the higher levels becomes, for
all practical purposes, perfect. Is that an essentially correct
oversimplification?


The stairstep errors don't get smoothed, they become randomized. Think of
quantization errors as being splats of paint on the wall. Without dither the
splats of paint would tend to be grouped, so they would look like bigger
messier splats.

Dither makes the splats more uniformly distributed so they appear to be
smaller and actually more like some nicely shaded, more neutral color.

BTW, dithering pretty much works this way when it's applied to computer
graphics.