I know, this has been discussed a couple of times...but I thoght it's that time again.
I never bothered much about what type of dithering I was using, didn't think it mattered much...
Usually I just dithered during mastering in Pro Tools, using the mbit+ mode in Ozone5...
Recently I've noticed that on some occasions I seem to have dithered twice (had the dither function in waveburner, which I use to create my masters, active by accident)...
So I decided to not use the izotope dither anymore but bounce my mastered wavs as 24 bit files and then let the POW-r dither in Waveburner do the final dithering.
Before comitting to that I thought I should at least create a blind test...and that's what I did.
I bounced a mix through my mastering chain and printed it:
a: 24 bit
b: 16 bit, no dither
c: 16 bit POW-r#1
d: 16 bit POW-r#2
e: 16 bit Ozone mbit+, noise shaping high.
then I had all the tracks in my PT session and used the mute switches on the Control 24 to create a true blind test (always comparing two tracks at a time, two fingers on the mute switches of those track, switching between them without knowing which one was muted at the time).
So I first compared the 24 bit file to the truncated 16 bit file...damn, what a difference!
so I thought to myself "wow, I'll make sure to always dither from now on, but it probably doesn't matter much what type of dither I'm using"......that changed when I then started to compare the different types of dither with each other...
And the MBIT+ just won every time, I thought the differences would be tiny and I'd probably just be cheating myself, but comparing with the other 3 16 bit tracks I was able to tell when I was listening to the mbit+ dithered file 100% of the time (both with headphones (mh50) and monitors (o300).
The MBIT+ file just sounded much closer to the original 24 bit file.
So just to be sure I then imported the 24 bit file into Waveburner and exported it as 16 bit from there, using the POW-r#1 again...re-imported it into PT and compared it to the POW-r#1 file I created within protools...and tbh I couldn't really tell a difference...so far so good...but then I flipped the phase on one of the tracks and they didn't fucking cancel out at all (although they were sample aligned of course!)...so the file that went through the Waveburner export was apparently not identical with the file that went through the same dithering process within PT..WTF???!!!!
(to be extra sure that it's the dithering that's causing the difference and not some fuck up in the import/export process I also imported my 24bit testfile into WB and exported it from there just to re-import into PT again..and voila, the null test shows that the ex-im-ex-imported file cancels out 100% with the original test file...
What does that mean? Well, that means that the same algo (POW-r#1) sounds different in Pro Tools than it does in WaveBurner.
My conclusion:
I prefer the sound of the MBIT+ dithered file as it's closest to the original 24bit, but I'll probably still be using the dithering process in WB in the future (just because it's really last in the chain after fades etc).
Unfortunately Ozone doesn't work in WB (a ton of bugs), so it's either dithering with izotope in PT or letting WB do the final dithering
What's your opinion on this topic?
I never bothered much about what type of dithering I was using, didn't think it mattered much...
Usually I just dithered during mastering in Pro Tools, using the mbit+ mode in Ozone5...
Recently I've noticed that on some occasions I seem to have dithered twice (had the dither function in waveburner, which I use to create my masters, active by accident)...
So I decided to not use the izotope dither anymore but bounce my mastered wavs as 24 bit files and then let the POW-r dither in Waveburner do the final dithering.
Before comitting to that I thought I should at least create a blind test...and that's what I did.
I bounced a mix through my mastering chain and printed it:
a: 24 bit
b: 16 bit, no dither
c: 16 bit POW-r#1
d: 16 bit POW-r#2
e: 16 bit Ozone mbit+, noise shaping high.
then I had all the tracks in my PT session and used the mute switches on the Control 24 to create a true blind test (always comparing two tracks at a time, two fingers on the mute switches of those track, switching between them without knowing which one was muted at the time).
So I first compared the 24 bit file to the truncated 16 bit file...damn, what a difference!
so I thought to myself "wow, I'll make sure to always dither from now on, but it probably doesn't matter much what type of dither I'm using"......that changed when I then started to compare the different types of dither with each other...
And the MBIT+ just won every time, I thought the differences would be tiny and I'd probably just be cheating myself, but comparing with the other 3 16 bit tracks I was able to tell when I was listening to the mbit+ dithered file 100% of the time (both with headphones (mh50) and monitors (o300).
The MBIT+ file just sounded much closer to the original 24 bit file.
So just to be sure I then imported the 24 bit file into Waveburner and exported it as 16 bit from there, using the POW-r#1 again...re-imported it into PT and compared it to the POW-r#1 file I created within protools...and tbh I couldn't really tell a difference...so far so good...but then I flipped the phase on one of the tracks and they didn't fucking cancel out at all (although they were sample aligned of course!)...so the file that went through the Waveburner export was apparently not identical with the file that went through the same dithering process within PT..WTF???!!!!
(to be extra sure that it's the dithering that's causing the difference and not some fuck up in the import/export process I also imported my 24bit testfile into WB and exported it from there just to re-import into PT again..and voila, the null test shows that the ex-im-ex-imported file cancels out 100% with the original test file...
What does that mean? Well, that means that the same algo (POW-r#1) sounds different in Pro Tools than it does in WaveBurner.
My conclusion:
I prefer the sound of the MBIT+ dithered file as it's closest to the original 24bit, but I'll probably still be using the dithering process in WB in the future (just because it's really last in the chain after fades etc).
Unfortunately Ozone doesn't work in WB (a ton of bugs), so it's either dithering with izotope in PT or letting WB do the final dithering
What's your opinion on this topic?