| elfy wrote on Thu, 22 September 2005 14:59 |
Now track 10, i believe has IDR, type 2 ultra,
but besides that it is clearly the most inaudible to me during the fade out.
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Danger Will Robinson.
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One thing i do have to say about this dither i believe to be the most inaudible is that at the very end of the fade out, the sound
changes to a truncation type sound without dither, if you get what i mean, or i could be using incorrect terminology.
But it gives a zipper type effect, and i would be tempted to fade this out, which might defeat the purpose of using this dither in the first place.
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Cautions against using Waves type 2 have not been stated strongly enough by Waves. In actuality it was invented to help when dithering at even lower wordlengths like 8 bits, where the hiss of the dither can become as annoying as the distortion without the dither.
You should not use type 2 on a 16 bit file as it will by definition add grunge. It is incomplete dither basically, not sufficient dither amplitude to fully dither the signal so you hear the effect of the grunge and then full cut out of sound that you would get if there were no dither at all, only you can get a little bit lower level resolution than with no dither at all.
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Also, If this dither that i believe to be the most inaudible turns out to be the waves idr type 2 ultra dither.
Waves does not recommend the use of ultra for cd mastering in there product manual.
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It's the type 2 that they should be warning against.
Some have made warnings against using ultra noise shaping was that under certain circumstances some potential clicks or ticks migh occur if one were to reedit noise shaped material. Or reprocess (redither) it and the cumulative high frequency noise could become audible. It's been shown by many experienced engineers that the worries about the clicks are just that, worries but with no practical effects. The concerns about the cumulative high frequency noise are much more valid, but if you make a 16 bit dithered file you are not expecting it to be reprocessed anyway.
Apparently the noise shaped dither has no effect on codecs, either, to the best of my knowledge.
The issue with inferior dacs is that to reproduce the dynamic range that is "encoded" in high resolution dithered material the DAC has to have good low level resolution to begin with. For example, if you take a 24 bit file and dither it to 16 bits, you have to have a DAC which is linear to "nominally" 24 bits (let's say 20 bits) to properly reproduce the 16 bit result. But I am not certain what the audible consequences of using a poor DAC would be, it would be no worse than using a poor DAC with the original 24 bit file as far as I can see. The dither won't affect the poor DAC, just that you won't hear the low levels of the music that's mixed with the dither properly.
Anyway, choose whether or not you use noise shaped dither, ultra or otherwise by your ears, there are few other concerns.
I received an excellent 16 bit DAT for mastering, and in the end mastered it with POW-R 2 or 3 with excellent results. The master was several dB louder than the mix so that may have helped by "separating the dithers". But anyway, to my observations, noise shaped dither on top of previous flat 16 bit dither doesn't seem to hurt at all. Caution is advised... listen for artifacts. I checked and checked and checked and my master sounded warm and full and fat and punchy and clear and musical, and the client loved it. Maybe the dither had nothing to do with that
BK
