Dithering

Dithering is the technique of adding small quantities of noise to a signal to reduce the audibility of low level distortion in a digital recording. A small amount of random noise is added to the analog signal before the sampling stage, reducing the effect of quantization errors.

By adding a special kind of noise at an extremely low level, the quantization errors are minimized. The added noise can be perceived as a very low-level quiescent hiss added to the recording. However, this is hardly noticeable and preferred to the distortion that occurs otherwise. The Noise Shaping options of the Internal Dithering plug-ins allow you to filter this noise to a frequency area less sensitive to the human ear.

In WaveLab Pro, dithering is applied when reducing the number of bits in a recording, for example, when moving from 24 to 16 bits, and when applying processing. You can choose between WaveLab Pro’s internal dithering algorithm, the Lin Dither algorithm, or any external dithering plug-in.