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

"Dithering, done properly, will completely eliminate any kind of nonlinear distortion DUE TO QUANTIZATION."

I'm not sure what you mean by "due to quantization"....

This statement is also too generalized. For if a dithered signal, for example, is played back with a non-OS DAC, the distortion will actually *increase*....

If one could recreate a pure, clean sine wave of just one or two bits of amplitude, then he can claim the distortion could be eliminated significantly. But try finding an actual unaltered output waveform that looks like that. (No distortion can ever be eliminated completely. Unless the signal itself is also eliminated completely.)

"It does not mask distortion, as someone says, and it does not 'partially' eliminate it"

It does indeed partially eliminate it!!! And the degree of elimination is dependent on both how the dither is implemented and the characteristic of the DAC's digital filter.

"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."

So now you're saying it is *partial*....

"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."

If you change the final words to "under the raw data's least-significant bit", this above paragraph is accurate... But "in the right circumstances" and recovery of information under the LSB are *directly* related to the degree the earlier-discussed distortion is eliminated.
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