Stereo Dithered Mixer
I've been reading the Digidesign 48bit mixer white paper & haven't been able to find an answer to this question, so I thought I'd ask it here in the hopes of getting some straight answers.
I've been thinking alot about the 'stereo dithered mixer' plug-in for Pro Tools HD & after doing some research I can't seem to find out at what point the 24bit dither is applied to the master output?
It can't be post fader because the fader is pre-insert on the master which would defeat the dither if plugins were inserted. So an educated guess would be that it must be applied after the last plug-in insert right? If this is the case it seems redundant in many ways. For example if you had an L2 or Ozone with 24bit TPDF dither on it why would you need Digi's dither? More to the point the plug-in bus truncates to 24bits on the I/O of each plugin inserted so you are already adding 24bit truncation distortion between plug-ins before the output is dithered to 24bits so how is Digidesign's 'dithered mixer' going to be of any sonic benefit at all if plug-ins or hardware inserts are used?
I have been running the dithered mixer in Pro Tools for years, but then after a recent thread on Glenn Meadows mastering webboard regarding 24bit dither, I got to thinking about how this works in Pro Tools HD & wondered where the dither is actually applied using the dithered mixer plugin. Anywhere it's put I can see potential for problems. Or am I missing something?
I think it's time Digidesign upgraded the precision of the plug-in bus, if the mix bus can run at 48bit why can't this be maintained right through the plug-in bus as well? I understand that it would use more DSP but sonic precision does come at a cost. At least we should have the option to turn this on just like the stereo dithered mixer plug-in. I think some of the native DAW's are heading in the right direction with high definition 64bit floating point precision maintained all the way through & they do sound incredible. soundBlade, Samplitude, Sonar & Sequoia all come to mind here.
Matt
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