Ok guys, I brought this topic back to life 'cause I need some help here.
I have the CS Analog Dither CD and I'm using Pro Tools to track (48K/24bit), mix and "master" all my projects.
I just want to develop the best possible result to my customers (already "mastered" or not).
How should I proceed to introduce dither?
The way I'm doing now is:
- I have the mix done, then I add a stereo track with the audio imported from the CS Dither CD. I leave the fader at unity gain and bounce the mix to 16/44.1 with all dither avaliable turned off (the one from PT, the one from the L1 UltraMax...)
Is this correct? I hardly can hear any difference on the bounced file with or without the dither track.
Please help me with this one!!!!!

I am just reading this stuff now so I want to ad my 2 cents. I have not used this Cranesong box but if your hearing a big improvement in the sound after it's inserted in your singanl chain it ain't the dither option!! This tone control you mentioned is probably what you are hearing. To put it as simple as I can when using dither properly it's purpose is to decimate from a higher bit rate to a lower bit rate without just chopping off the higher bits. To make the best of a bad situation if you will. I won't get into how it works because there are several different "types". For example use it if you have a 24bit soundfile and you want to burn it to a CD. If you are working on a song keep it at the highest bit rate as possible until the very end. Run your final eq'd mix through dither only when it is going to CD.

This is why dither sould not really improve the sound. Your 24 bit file will sound better than a after it's dithered to 16bit. (Kinda sucks don't it)

Thats one reason to hope for the success of hi resolution audio.

Next we should discuss hi res.

Thanks, Joe

I watched this thread too Joe. You nailed it.

Wondering when someone was going to key in on it.

As for high rez, I have an SACD player here. I am quite disappointed that my 24bit masters seem to eat 90% of the SACD's I have. Reason being, if DSD is going to survive, the OM needs to be mastered around the DSD standard. I do think I hear one CD where it was mastered from a post RIAA master! Yes it is that bad. Going from Redbook, to SACD, to hard drive and comparing leaves me to believe the engineers doing the work in DSD (except Telarc) are really not using the format to it's greatest potential. Get Toto IV on SACD. Truly horrible. Lots of dynamics, but where is that sound I get from my vinyl? Even the redbook sounds smoother, more powerful. Where's the bass? High rez,It is an exclusive club right now..but it will not be long when we all have the machines to RECORD in Direct streme digital and show the "clowns, who is in town". So far the format (other than Jazz restoration and Classical) is not giving up the goods as it was designed to. I also admit running 32bit float is no better than 24 on the word depth. I do run at 384K but rendering is a time consuming process. I do editing at 24/192.

Their are just too many rooms, too many ears, two many bean counters and not enough talent surrounding the format. I freaked when I visited a mastering facility (name witheld) that puts out a lot of work to find the amps buried 100 feet away from the speakers and one of the input balance controls higher than the other by a whole notch. No wonder I heard a few works, leaning right.

Ho hummmmmm...

Hey...
Any of you guys have answered my question :(
Please...

Joe did, right above my post.

"To put it as simple as I can when using dither properly it's purpose is to decimate from a higher bit rate to a lower bit rate without just chopping off the higher bits. To make the best of a bad situation if you will. I won't get into how it works because there are several different "types". For example use it if you have a 24bit soundfile and you want to burn it to a CD. If you are working on a song keep it at the highest bit rate as possible until the very end. Run your final eq'd mix through dither only when it is going to CD.

This is why dither sould not really improve the sound. Your 24 bit file will sound better than a after it's dithered to 16bit. (Kinda sucks don't it)"

I try'ed to post this last week but for some reason I don't see it. My 2 cents on this "incredible" sound difference after using the Crane Song Dither box is this. If you hear a big improvement in the audio quality after you use this device IT AINT THE DITHER!!

The tone control or whatever else the thing has is making the difference. The purpose of dither is to decimate a higher bit rate to a lower bit rate while retaining as much of the auidio information as possible. I won't go into how it works because there are different types and plenty of papers on the web that could to a better job than I.

So if you have a 24bit stereo soundfile and you dither it down to 16bit so you can burn it to CD no matter how good the dither is it's not going to be as good as the original 24bit (let alone better.) Kinda sucks don't it. Well thats the world of red book 16bit CD's that we currently live in.

This is why we should all be pushing for the success of high definiton audio like SACD and DVDA. Now those are subjects we should really talk about. I will post some info on these two subjects soon.

Bill,

True that to hear the full advantage of hi rez audio including SACD it needs to be recorded using DSD and followed all the way through the process. When CD's fist came out we had the same problem. Labels want to get as much product out for as little as possible. Thwy would just call up the person in there library ask them to grab the masters and they were just dumped into a DAW and sent out. I know a couple records where the cassette masters were used by mistake. Now you see the records for the most part being properly re mastered.

My fear is the labels will do the same with DVDA. Just take the CD master and dump it to a DVDA disc put a sticker on it and call it DVDAudio. People buy it and listen to it and guess what, it don't sound any better. It likely will sound worse bacause who knows if they are paying attention to the proper conversion...

Lets hope for the best. I've heard some hi rez stuff that sounds great. The potential is there.

Joe

What about the fader level!? :)
Sorry for beign that picky...

I just recently bought bought a DVD-Audio player (relatively inexpensive one) and an SACD player (a pretty good one, the Philips SACD-1000). Both are better than CD with the right material, the SACD player being my favorite sounding (but likely much of that difference being the much better analog section on the Philips). Good SACD material is coming very close to my Basis 2001 turntable + Rega RB900 arm + Van den Hul Frog cartridge + BAT VK-P5 tube phone preamp sound, both SACD and vinyl have a 3 dimensionality and naturalness of reverb and cymbals that CD just doesn't come close on. I've gotten a number of original DSD jazz and classical recordings, one of them being direct to 2-track DSD. I'm still listening and comparing, but I think the SACD even gets the nod over vinyl in the sense of dynamics that it conveys, especially on low compression sources like small modal jazz groups and classical.

Sony really needs to move over to hybrid discs like Telarc has. I can't believe they are being that cheap in forcing you to own both the SACD and separate CD given they're trying to get the format off the ground. On second thought, I can believe it. They need to get a clue.

I'm really looking forward to the Stones' early catalog being released on hybrid SACD/CD at the end of this month. Not the best sounding recordings to begin with, but I think Beggar's Banquet / Let It Bleed / Get Yer Ya Ya's Out will sound pretty darn good.

If you want to hear SACD in all it's glory, pick up a player (I got the Philips SACD-1000 for $795 ! from www.oade.com), and get a copy of MoFi's Patricia Barber 'Modern Cool'. Not DSD at the source, but who cares, it sounds amazing transferred from analog tape. Mighty Sam McClain's 'Blues for the Soul' on Telarc (DSD source) is also exceptional.

On DVD-Audio, reissues of Hotel California, Night At The Opera and Rumours are all improvements over the CD and come pretty close to vinyl.

We do as an audio community need to promote these new formats (well, at least one of them). It's FUN to listen again!

Mike

Just to clarify things, the Cranesong dither is not a transparent dither intended to make a 16 bit recording sound as close as possible to a 24 bit recording. It sounds a lot like 15 ips tape hiss. There is a loss of transparency but will occasionally be an improvement in depth and texture. The situations where the net effect has been an improvement for me have definitely been cases of "damaged goods" to begin with.

Jeronimo, Here I am!!!

a)files 48k/24 bits
bounce 48k/24 to 44k/24 bit first
turn off TC, C4, L1 and other dithers in the chain

b) reimport your new file, now at 44k/24 bits
add a dither algorithm, like the POWER dither level 3..
bounce to 44k/16 bits

watch out!some folks ( me too) have noticed some different peak levels after the bounce procedure.
So, watch out if you are not going into the danger zone. back up your gain a little or apply some L1

Alécio

Have any of you guys some suggestions for the different dither algorithms within PT?

I generally use POWER at level 3.

what would b better for rock, classical, pop?
thanks in advance
:w:

Is this the same 'dithering' you get with Cubase VST or the Apogee version that comes with Cubase 32?

Originally posted by Bob Olhsson:
Just to clarify things, the Cranesong dither is not a transparent dither intended to make a 16 bit recording sound as close as possible to a 24 bit recording. It sounds a lot like 15 ips tape hiss....

Bob hit the nail on the head as far as the noise. The reason it (the noise, not the act of dither itself which isn't even happening while you are listening to it real-time but only during the bit-rate conversion process) makes things sound better is the same reason a cassette tape before being cleaned up with noise reduction sounds "livelier" than the cleaned version even if the cleaning was done extremely well. Our ears like excitement. After all, that's what sound is: excited air waves that excite our eardrums and then our brains. The higher frequency stuff (and even lower frequencies that are higher than the bass tones) act as harmonics which is what gives instruments and music their timbre and differentiates them from the boring old sine wave. It's called psychoacoustics and is a huge phenomenon beyond the scope of this post and one reason we have to record music at at least 44.1Khz even though most people, older ones especially, can't hear (in the sense that if asked "do you hear that" and all you were playing were the above 10khz frequencies they would say "no"). Bottom line, if you can hear it making a difference, and you like that difference, then use it. If not, don't. Those two sentences cover about everything you'll ever need to know about music production.

I've been doing this for years, in theory. I recorded 24 tracks of tape hiss onto a dat, and usually unmute it in the hooks of my pro tools session around -20 db or so. The crane song cd was way too "undetectable" to my clients.

Hey Alécio,

What kind of PT are you using!? I don't remember seeing different dithers in my PT setup...

On mix plus rigs, there are several dither plug in's available: POWr, the dither in the Ultramizer, the dither in the TC MASTER X, Apogee Mastertools, etc..

I recently purchased the cranesong analog dither cd and it does make a difference on poor mixes. a difference that i liked very much. Subtle but not too. :p

Been away from this forum for awhile...

Being the starter of this thread, I feel that I must post a reponse to the latest replies.

For those who are not familiar with the CS Dither CD, it is a Redbook Audio Compact Disc with analog (so they say) dither noise recorded onto it. I don't know the source of the dither noise but, obviously, it has, at some point, been converted to digital info at 44.1/16. The Crane Song Analog Dither CD is NOT a plug-in or an effects box - therefore there is NO tone control or similar feature (or any other control for that matter).

If you play the CD in a CD player, you can hear the noise thru your monitors. It basically sounds like hiss but with some strange sub characteristics added.

As per the instructions, the dither noise is to be recorded onto a stereo track in a DAW and mixed UNEFFECTED with the rest of the program material. The dither track should be mixed in at a level of -25dB and should be routed directly to the master bus. The dither is then applied to the final mix during the rendering process. It would also be applied during playback to another medium.

After the dither track is recorded, you can zoom in on the waveform and see a rather strange wave pattern. For those of you who are in the know, you could probably look at it and enligthen the rest of us as to what type/shape/whatever the CS dither is. It is definitely not like any other waveform I have ever seen before - even tape hiss. If you play this track from your DAW you will hear it.

I was astounded at the difference between the muted and unmuted dither track. When unmuted, my mix gained depth & clarity (and yes, even a sense of warmth) that it lacked w/o the CS dither noise added. I never tried to imply that using the CS dither would make your 44/16 tracks sound as good as or better than 88/24 tracks (which is what I applied the dither to). I simply was amazed at the difference between the track with & w/o the dither applied. I was not able to achieve this difference with any dither plug-in that I tried.

The Crane Song Analog Dither CD is a valuable tool in my box. I use it on some material but not all. However subtle, it does make a noticeable difference (to my ears) and is worth having around when the need arises. As someone else pointed out, if you like it - use it; if you don't - don't.