High-end audio
"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
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"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
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The counterpoint is that virtually every real-world audio signal
has enough noise to dither itself. Enough of it comes from the
analog domain, which just isn't that clean compared to 16 bits.
I'm not sure this is correct. But I'm not going to argue the point
before doing some checking.
Funny story that involves your good buddy, Mr. JA.
I hope you mean that sarcastically. John is no more my "good buddy" than
you
are.
He wrote a glowing SP review of a Meridian ADC with selectable dither,
centerpieced by his experiences transcribing one of his analog master
tapes. In his sighted evaluations he seemed to find a different poetic
description of every different dither that the Meridian added. I did a
little
study of the situation and found that as a rule, the analog tape had tens
dB more noise, even on an fractional-octave basis.
So... are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?
The purpose of dither is to sufficiently randomize the quantization error
that it's no longer correlated with the signal. This requires noise with a
P-P value of two quantization steps (I think).
So far so good.
The background noise of an analog signal is unlikely to be at this level.
It is likely to be this high or appreciably higher almost all of the time.
William, you need some time in the real world, actually looking at recorded
signals and signals at the output of a mic preamp or even just the mic.
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