A member canceled their subscription recently because I didn't care enough about dither.

Out of all the audio concepts, it was dither that made them lose confidence in my teaching.

But here's the thing: dither isn't important.

It's just noise you add to your signal when bouncing your audio down a bit-depth, and it adds that noise to mask the quantization distortion that happens when you're truncating bits down due to the way digital audio behaves.

Huh?

Exactly. Who cares.

Just add it as the last thing you do before you finish your master, and you should be fine. A limiter will often add dithering, and so does the export feature on some DAWS (like Logic).

Make sure you add it only once because more dither does not improve your record in any way.

It's just noise. Add it once and get over it.

Here are some things you're better off spending time on instead of dither:

"Literally everything else that goes into making your record sound as good as possible."

End of list.

Have a good day,

Björgvin

P.S.

Out of all the audio processors you have at your disposal, there is actually one that I consider being the most important:

The All-Mighty EQ.

It's the only processor you need to understand to create separation between your tracks and balance in your mixes. I created EQ Strategies - Your Ultimate Guide to EQ to help you with just that problem. Click the link below to check it out:

www.EQStrategies.net