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Dither Myths and Facts

Twenty-five years after the discovery of the desirable attributes of nonsubtractive triangular probability density function dither for signal quantization, some misunderstandings, myths, and half-truths still abound regarding what dither does and does not do. The increased use of dithered sigma-delta modulators has recently brought some of these questions to the fore. Some of these errors are relatively easy to explain and correct, while others are considerably more subtle in nature, but nevertheless also need to be addressed. This paper attempts to explain and clarify these matters, with the aid of copious time-domain, frequency-domain, and statistical-domain illustrations. It assumes that the reader already has a good knowledge of the theory of dithered quantization.

Authors: Lipshitz, Stanley P.; Vanderkoy, John
Affiliation: Audio Research Group, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
AES Convention:117 (October 2004) Paper Number:6279 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Signal Processing

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