this is unbelievable...

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steve
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Re: this is unbelievable...

Post by steve » Thu Mar 21, 2013 12:44 am

Yes A is dithered, but it depends what you mean by "fidelity". B has more distortion than A (if you listen carefully to the tail end of the fade-out the sound in B gains a "metallic" tone). Personally I find it pretty hard to hear any significant difference unless I crank up the volume to an uncomfortable level.

This is the 32 bit master:
dither-test-master.wav
(516.84 KiB) Downloaded 57 times
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kozikowski
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Re: this is unbelievable...

Post by kozikowski » Thu Mar 21, 2013 2:36 am

Warm, lush fidelity when you didn't start with any isn't good, either.
It comes down to producing in a way that's pleasing to you. People who mix on vintage Neve desks and use multi-track analog tape machines are right there with you. Surgical accuracy isn't always the best thing.

Koz

bomber1978
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Re: this is unbelievable...

Post by bomber1978 » Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:19 am

Where do you change the dithering setting?
I have Audacity 2.0 from March 2012, and I went into EDIT - PREFERENCES and REAL TIME CONVERSION and HIGH QUALITY CONVERSION both have DITHER set to NONE.
Is this something different to what is being discussed here?

steve
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Re: this is unbelievable...

Post by steve » Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:46 am

bomber1978 wrote: I went into EDIT - PREFERENCES and REAL TIME CONVERSION and HIGH QUALITY CONVERSION both have DITHER set to NONE.
That's it, Dither is disabled.
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bomber1978
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Re: this is unbelievable...

Post by bomber1978 » Thu Mar 21, 2013 6:15 am

That's right I remember I turned dither off myself, when I first download Audacity 2.0 I noticed when changing speed of the same file 2 times and comparing the 2 files in EAC WAVE Compare the samples would be different (but with a previous Audacity version changing the speed of a file twice would give the same samples), I remember back then Gale pointed me to this in the bug/fixes sections.... Switching dither off fixed the problem and from there on changing the speed of a file would result in the same samples each time....
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Dither noise is incorrectly applied by default if exporting to most formats where the bit depth is the same as (or higher than) the project. For example, this occurs if exporting to 16-bit WAV, 16-bit FLAC or MP3 from a 16-bit project. OGG is unaffected. Workarounds: Set "High Quality" dither to "None" in the Quality Preferences. To fix any files that have already been affected, see this Forum topic.
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