Dither as a last step?

Posted by midimaniac (A) on December 31, 2010 at 22:31:20

I spend all my time at the Vinyl Asylum, but am posting here because I need some advice from a pro! I am only a serious amateur.

I've been doing vinyl restoration for years, most of it on my approx. 500 LPs. Last year I underwent a MAJOR bigtime upgrade to my vinyl front end and started the digitization of my vinyl all over again. I believe this will be the last time for that, as all of my equipment is of a very high grade now.

I use Waves plug-ins in my editor exclusively. My usual procedure is running the Restoration Bundle, followed by L1 Ultra-Maximizer, which I use to limit a few peaks and to dither. I then downsample to 44.1, then split and save to 16bit wave file. For those who are curious, the splitting places each track into a block of samples which is divisible by 588 samples according to Redbook, which writes the information into 1/75th of a second blocks. (44,100 / 588 = 1/75th.) All this is just saying the track markers are adjusted minisculely to make a CD friendly wave file.

Regarding dither, it is usually agreed that it should be the very last step in a mastering process. But, as noted above, I have always dithered an 88.2kHz/24bit file as its last step, then downsample, split, and save.

It recently occurred to me that this method could make the dither ineffective, since rendering to 16bits after dithering the 24bit file does not put the dither as the last step. I am thinking the dither existed in the last few bits of the 24bit file and gets truncated out of the file when I convert it to 16bit? I know dither is a subtle issue to begin with, but would appreciate any advice/info I can get.

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Topic - Dither as a last step? - midimaniac 22:31:20 12/31/10 (3)

your process seems illogical to me - bwb 10:18:13 09/07/11 (0)

RE: Dither as a last step? - brew 12:57:38 01/20/11 (1)

RE: Dither as a last step? - midimaniac 18:56:29 01/20/11 (0)

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