TL;DW: If you like truncation and artificial vibe, try this!

HighGlossDither

Here’s an Airwindows science experiment!

The idea here was to identify things about truncation that some people (maybe crazy people, but people nonetheless) like, and build them into a dedicated dither. This video includes extensive exploration of truncation, TPDF and flat dithers besides HighGlossDither, so there’s an educational value as well. As for audio value, the important thing to remember is that this one is designed to act like truncation in important ways… so it’s ‘broken’ and you shouldn’t use it for naturalistic things, and you probably shouldn’t use it unless you’ve ever chosen truncation instead of dither, on purpose, because you wanted the edgier, crunchier, different-textured sound of truncation for what you were doing.

If that’s ever you, this is an alternate way to get your sounds.

The deal with truncation is that it turns the fine details of your mix into a roaring, grunging mess of unnatural noise. The secret of it is, that stuff can act like some horrible sort of parallel compression. It’ll hang onto the tails of notes way longer than it should, and it’ll add intense bit-crusher-like effects to quiet sounds.

HighGlossDither uses a special, more uniform-sounding quadratic residue sequence instead of real randomness to sorta ‘diffract’ sounds into crunchier versions of themselves, and applies it at a quieter level than true dither. The result is a hybrid between dither and truncation: rather than dropping quietly into a sea of noise, quiet sounds get hyped and distorted, but they still behave a lot more normally than truncated sounds do. You get the crazy tonal hype, but a better approximation of the proper relative volume levels of the sounds. And you get a sort of noise but it’s quieter than TPDF is, and also serves a purpose of interacting with the sounds.

Most people shouldn’t like this. I’m introducing it first to get it out of the way… but who knows? Maybe you’re looking to bring out the next generation of Finnish forest psy trance, and the last thing you want is for the molecular structure of your music to sound natural. Well, HighGlossDither might be right up your alley! You don’t have to resort to truncation to have the finest details of your audio sounding weird and unreal. Take it up another level, with my blessing.

Or maybe you’d prefer your audio sounding, you know, good. If so, stay tuned :)

To support these kinds of researches, and protect my ability to be honest about this stuff (no sense trying to put this out as if it was normal!) please support my Patreon. As you can see, I’m able to try things outside the boundaries of normal commercial behavior, and because I’m not selling the plugins I don’t have to pretend they’re more generally useful than they are: if I’m trying something really strange I’ll say so. HighGlossDither is strange. Enjoy playing with it, and there’s more relevant stuff coming soon. :)

TL;DW: Single pole highpassed TPDF dither.

PaulDither

As long as we’re making TPDF dithers, here’s something worth noticing, and a shout-out to a great person.

In a public Facebook discussion on dither, Paul Frindle (Sony Oxford, and the DSM 2 ‘prismatic compressor’) suggested his own preferred solution, in general terms: “The one we use most is triangular single pole high pass dither. It not freq bent enough sound odd, but is slightly less audible that flat dither. It can also be easily made by taking one sample of dither away from the previous one – this gives you the triangular PDF and the filtering in one go :-) “

The great thing about this is, we don’t have to get his code to be able to do that. In fact, I’m not: I’m using a sample of dither, storing it to be the previous one, then taking it away from the next sample of dither (which is backwards from what he suggests). However, the effect is the same: TPDF single pole high pass dither.

The coolest thing about this is, it’s actually twice as CPU efficient as normal TPDF! You store a dither sample (random generation is a pretty CPU-hungry process when done properly, and it sounds better when you don’t half-ass it) and then you use it again for the highpass! So not only is it just as good as regular TPDF, it’s cheaper to use.

Thank Paul for that, not me. (though I do have some ideas about ways to tweak it: I think I can put a cancellation node right where the ear is most sensitive and make the noise ‘quieter’. Paul’s no doubt already tried this and didn’t like it as well, but hey, I’ll try it too and let you all try it, for free. Paul would know exactly what I’m proposing to do as soon as I mentioned a ‘node’, and it’s nearly as cheap to run as his highpassed dither, but not quite)

So what do you get? Well, this is still a TPDF dither, so you get mathematically correct dither that doesn’t fluctuate in volume. You don’t get ‘the Sony Oxford’ dither, because I don’t have Paul’s code. But you do get the Airwindows implementation of this general concept, and I probably have it sounding pretty good in my own right.

The tone is brighter because it’s highpassed. That makes it a quieter bed of noise, and there’s a sort of silky, not-harsh quality to it that’s nice. I think it does affect perceptions of brightness and the tonal quality of the mix, so it’s a choice, not ‘the automatic correct option’. It’ll give a ‘sound’, and focus your attention differently, towards detail and a subtle revoicing of the track. If you mix through it, your choices will be conditioned by this way of hearing (remember, use 24-bit dither like this when monitoring on a DAC that takes 24 bit input, and your 24 bit files will also match what you hear: putting dither only on mixdowns is silly and misleading)

If I was going to use just a TPDF dither, it would be this one every time, because it’s not just a TPDF dither, it’s silky and sweet and a bit quieter than the usual kind. And just as Paul told us freely what the basic concept was, so Airwindows PaulDither is free. Thanks, Paul :)