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Wow, what's this? A real technical question.

Well, to answer your question #1, I suspect that y'all find it's a very nasty question, but you can safely presume that there will be lots of high-order haromincs, i.e. many times the original tone, and that those can even alias down into the baseband, creating inharmonic garbage as well. Not dithering is bad.

To question 2: Dithering, done properly, will completely eliminate any kind of nonlinear distortion DUE TO QUANTIZATION. It does not mask distortion, as someone says, and it does not "partially" eliminate it, it eliminates any distortion DUE TO THE QUANTIZATION.

It is especially necessary on baseband (i.e. non-oversampled) convertors.

Now, y'all realize, that I qualified the "eliminate distortion" in very large letters. There are, mind you, lots of other ways to get nonlinear distortions, from bad convertors, sample and holds, op amps, filters, ... so that doesn't mean all distortions go away.

And, yes, dither does raise the total system noise level by a small amount compared to the total error represented by the harmonics. It has to.

Oddly enough, though, that means that you can recover signals of much lower energy with dither than without, because for a low-level signal, the undithered result will be 0 0 0 0 0 0 ... and the dithered result will consist of a pattern of -1's, 0's and 1's, that do in fact contain the low-level signal to the extent possible given the noise level. And, yes, y'all can hear it, too, in the right circumstances, under the dither level.

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