I've used Blue for a decade and found nothing better. Orange is great for transparent surgical cuts on a master. I prefer both at 96k rather than using individual up-sampling.

Wow, thanks Bob! Seems I haven't finished shopping for eq after all......demo time.

Thanks for that info, I guess some, or most of my confusion comes from my lack of knowledge of exactly how pro tools works under the hood. Plus, having read from multiple sources, that pro tools handles all the dithering required automatically???

I record at 48 24.

Anywhere from 12 to 14 tracks of drums, guitars, bass and vocals. mostly full on rock productions.

I mix with a variety of outboard gear both on hardware inserts, as well as analog summing. In the box I'm using mostly UAD plugins, as well as waves, fabfilter, ect.

Just knowing exactly where, and what dither plugin to use is where my uncertainty lies.

Thank you very much
Chuck

Pro Tools actually dithers 24-bit exports, just not bounces.

Stick it in front of any converter output or before printing a file, so also in front of hardware inserts. And on the end of the mix bus chain. Which goes to just another converter output of course.

Bob just listed a few dither plugs, and Airwindows also do a bunch which I have been using since the birth of this thread.

So if I were to bounce to disk, a mix, and say I had a limiter such as the fabfilter pro L 2 , which has a dither option, I shouldn’t use it because pro tools will dither automatically?

I very much appreciate all your help.

One more worthy of being on the list is the dither section in TB Barricade v4.
Jeroen has included the usual dither suspects plus his own PNS model.

From the manual:

PNS
Perceptual noise shaping (PNS) is based on TPDF and inherits all benefits of TPDF in that it removes both first- order as well as second-order dependencies between input signal and truncation errors. In other words, the result of PNS is a constant noise that does not fluctuate in level nor does it change the timbre of the input signal.
The difference between PNS and TPDF is in the spectrum of the quantization errors. TPDF introduces spectrally white noise, which means that the energy in the noise (as a result of truncation error and addition of dithering noise) is equally high for all frequencies. The goal of perceptual noise shaping is to modify the spectral properties of the quantization noise introduced by bit-depth reduction in such a way that it becomes less audible. Although due to information-theoretic constraints the total amount of noise cannot be reduced, one can exchange a lower noise level in one frequency region for higher noise levels in other regions. More specifically, PNS moves the truncation errors towards frequencies at which the human auditory system is less sensitive, for example towards frequencies above 20 kHz. This causes a significant reduction in noise levels at frequencies for which human listeners are very sensitive to noise (for example around 3-6 kHz).
Noise shaping is more effective at higher sampling rates. In Barricade v4, 32 kHz is the minimum sampling rate for noise shaping to work properly, but 48 kHz or 96 kHz will make the process much more effective.

Just tried the MAAT Linearise dither. Jesus. Instabuy. Changed the entire sound of my rig. Thank you very much indeed, Bob!!

Tried the SantaCruz too, and yes, very nice, but not sure I need it. Filterbank sounds very nice indeed for mixing now with the MAAT dither on the end. Love this thread.

Lol, Me too.

Thanks Bob, for this and all the info you and time you provided.

Impressive feature set, have to try Asap.
Thanks, great thread.

No, bounces must be dithered. File exports to lower bit-depths are what get auto-dithered.

most generous sir, thank you.

I just checked out that MAAT Linearise dither, and from what I can tell, it doesn't dither to 24bit? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I'm working at 24 bit and have a hardware insert, I need to dither to 24 bit before the insert, correct?

thanks

You do, and it does it here.....jut click and change the default 16bit setting.

I tend to use the old standby waves L1 / L2 on outputs. You can dither to 24bit plus a little limiting if you need it.

OK, I installed it and all is well. I would love your input on the proper way to dither the various elements in this scenario.

I have several drum tracks. Kick, Snare, ect. all of which have processing on them. They are being bused to an AUX, where I have a hardware insert going to a comp. The output of that AUX is then being output to an external summing mixer.
1. Do I dither the individual tracks as the last plugin?

2. Do I dither the AUX the tracks are being bused to BEFORE the hardware insert instead or also?

3. And do I also dither that same AUX AFTER the hardware insert since it's being output to and external mixer?

Good Lord! I apologize in advance...

Thanks again

Yes, all of those although do try it without the external mixer. I used to use the L1 limiter for dither however the plain dither plugs (with the exception of the PSP) don't add any latency.

This is a very interesting thread and I am glad I stumbled upon it. I am convinced that dithering is changing the way my mixes sound. After rendering out from Cubase, my projects sound brighter and thinner than the actual project.

So, with that said, I am using external reverb and comps, but I am using Cubase in 32 bit floating mode......would MAAT work for this?

Thanks,
fb

What, so dither at the end of every single channel strip that goes to an aux bus with other stuff, too? So pretty much at end of every single DAW mixer channel?

I thought only before converter outs or bounces/prints? Re-confused again. lol

From what I understand, if working with audio tracks (and probably VI sample library tracks also) the DAW (in my case Logic... for now) will be converting the 24 bit audio back to 32 bit float (albeit temporarily, until bounced)?

I suspect in this case dithering the tracks helps with real-time monitoring?

Although DAWs have 64 bit summing, so I'm not sure how much of a difference this will make, e.g.
https://www.meterplugs.com/blog/2017...nd-better.html

However, I suppose in mixing/mastering you want to hear exactly what the final result will be like also. Perhaps with no dither on the tracks you'll be monitoring the truncation in real-time [i.e. temporarily] rather than the dithered end result?

I'm confused also, lol.

But it would seem to me that for the final bus bounce the single track dithering can/should be switched off, as it's only needed once for the conversion?

OR the 24 bit audio file will be converted to 32 bit float with any processing in the DAW, so the dithering should come BEFORE any processing moves (even fader level adjustments)?

It's probably best to have the dithering on the sample/audio file itself - so record with it on the track (in anticipation)?

But then again 24 bit to 32 bit float is upsampling - so no dither is necessary!

Therefore the dither is only needed in the final bounce, or when bounced in place?

May be a BrE/AmE thing but 'bouncing' takes what's on a track or tracks and renders a new audio file on a new track. It does this apparently in Pro Tools without dither, so it's truncating from 32 bit float to a new 24 bit fixed audio file, saved in your project folder. This is where you need to use a dither plugin to stop that truncation distortion being introduced.

Rendering (AKA mixing down, exporting, printing the mix - I don't usually say 'bounce' for this but others might) will dither by default, but you could also bypass this and use your own dither plugin too.

Dither is not needed going from 24 bit UP to 32 bit or a higher bit depth.

In other news, it seems Logic has the problem of 32 bit floating point file IMPORTS being truncated to 24 bit!

Bit of a crapshoot out there...!

Hey Bob and Karloff, thanks for mentioning Linearise, for some reason this one passed me by. I love the MAAT stuff - I've got the RSPhaseShifter which is simply incredible, and have used Algorithmix Red and the NR plugins in particular for many years. Same fidelity, super high quality stuff. Cheers!

Yup, that RSPhaseshifter is coming this way very shortly! Might get the blue eq at some point, too.

I meant try not going out to an analog mixer! You don't want to dither auxes.

Yeah, other news, old news yet still the same news.
Logic will not import 32b....

Was really bummed out by that fact, but the silver lining of ending up here to learn about it all was a blessing.

https://www.airwindows.com/purestgain-vst/

I'm still trying to find the reason why one would dither a single track... This is the closest informational video I've found that explains something about the processing of DAWs (with an example).

The flattening of sound due to [incorrect] processing [of the mantissa] - in this example Logic's gain plugin (multiple stacked = flattening of sound).

What if that aux is output externally? Drum bus...

And or what if the aux has a hardware insert.

Ok, just to clarify, let’s say I have several individual tracks all being processed, and are being bused to an aux. (drum bus) let’s also say that aux has further processing. Do you dither the aux or not?

Just trying to wrap my head around all this. It's a very imformative video (many thanks BTW chrisj), seems to delve into what people are describing.

https://www.airwindows.com/bitshiftgain

Some more info regarding "digital audio sonic integrity", if you've not seen it...

& another great informative video from chrisj, many thanks!