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Old 10-09-2019, 04:33 PM
clpetersen clpetersen is offline
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Below is an excellent example of what dithering can do to reduce quantization noise.
Yes, it is a form of noise, but works extremely well. Even in mechanical systems*.



*Wikipedia - nice example of early dither -
"…[O]ne of the earliest [applications] of dither came in World War II. Airplane bombers used mechanical computers to perform navigation and bomb trajectory calculations. Curiously, these computers (boxes filled with hundreds of gears and cogs) performed more accurately when flying on board the aircraft, and less well on ground. Engineers realized that the vibration from the aircraft reduced the error from sticky moving parts. Instead of moving in short jerks, they moved more continuously. Small vibrating motors were built into the computers, and their vibration was called dither from the Middle English verb "didderen," meaning "to tremble." Today, when you tap a mechanical meter to increase its accuracy, you are applying dither, and modern dictionaries define dither as a highly nervous, confused, or agitated state. In minute quantities, dither successfully makes a digitization system a little more analog in the good sense of the word."

— Ken Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio[1]
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Last edited by clpetersen; 10-09-2019 at 09:42 PM.
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