AES E-Library

Resolution Below the Least Significant Bit in Digital Systems with Dither

The work was motivated by some common misunderstandings about digital systems. It is commonly believed that small signals or signal details are lost if they are smaller than the quantizing step. Expanding on previous arguments, it is shown that this is not true when the signal to be quantized contains a wide-band noise dither with an amplitude of approximately the step size. The introduction traces the use of dither from video quantization through to its use in audio. quantization error is studied in some detail and the effect of dither is analyzed theoretically and experimentally. By examples of quantized signals it is shown that the dither effectively turns signal distortion into low-level wide-band noise by linearizing the averaged quantizer staircase function, which is as perceived by the ear.

Authors: Vanderkooy, John; Lipshitz, Stanley P.
Affiliation: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3Gl, Canada
JAES Volume 32 Issue 3 pp. 106-113; March 1984 Import into BibTeX

Click to purchase paper or login as an AES member. If your company or school subscribes to the E-Library then switch to the institutional version. If you are not an AES member and would like to subscribe to the E-Library then Join the AES!

This paper costs $20 for non-members, $5 for AES members and is free for E-Library subscribers.

Learn more about the AES E-Library

E-Library Location: (CD aes4)   /jrnl7888/1984/7971.pdf

Start a discussion about this paper!