18 Mar
2004
18 Mar
'04
2:41 p.m.
Steve Harris wrote:
Great! If that can be done in a smooth way, without clicks and pops, it
would be really useful for blind testing of dithering agorhythms.
Take care,
Mark
On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 08:12:40AM -0800, Mark Knecht
wrote:
OK, good points one and all. I hadn't considered it in quite that way
before. To me (and I could be wrong) what you talk about above sounds
more like format conversion. I'm not a programmer so I could have this
messed up from a programmer's POV, but converting from a 24-bit ADC on
receive data to some internal float format and then later back to a
24-bit DAC on transmit is not what I think of as 'dithering'. I grant
you that there might be some form of dithering, in the sense of removing
low-order bits, taking place. Some ADC's insert noise in their
conversion at record time. However, I wouldn't have thought that either
apps or Jack is inserting noise into the process at all those steps are
they?
My POV in the previous statement was more about the form of dithering we
use when outputting specifically to a CD, for instance. The lost bits at
the bottom problem and the fact that people can hear below the noise
floor of 16-bit audio. I don't think people can hear below the noise
floor of 24-bit audio, or at least my ears certainly can't.
Steve Harris wrote:
JACK has to be able to dither - its receiving float data and outputting
ints - you cant reasonably ask every app to add dither to its outputs for
the case when thier going to ALSA, or for the user to attach a dithering
client to the output of every app that goes to ALSA. Yeah, my initial feeling is that JAMin should
offer to dither, so you can
control it centrally before JACK gets it hands on it, and be sure the
recording will be an accurate reflection of what you hear.
I agree. I've never thought the dither option in Jack made sense to me.
Jack should be a patch bay, not a processor. Too many options for mistakes. You *might* consider having 2 outputs from Jamin -
dithered and
undithered - so that possibly you could A/B the two. Please time align
the two if you ever do add an option like this.
I was imagining you would be able to switch the dither on the fly in the
UI.