DitherTo
DitherTo exists because dither’s not exactly a huge market segment, yet it’s important to getting digital tone with depth and spatiality. For that reason, I’ve picked two dithers out of what’s shipped with Ditherbox, and you can have top-quality boutique dither for free. You just can’t select whichever one you like, or switch to monitoring modes like Silhouette or SubsOnly, as you can with Ditherbox. But the actual dither is the same quality as the professional grade plugin.
DitherTo16 uses Vinyl dither. It stores up error energy and releases it in tiny sputters, like vinyl surface noise. This dither/noise shaping gets a nice rich sound out of CD-quality audio.
DitherTo24 uses Contingent dither, which gets a detailed, finely textured sound. It’s at such a low level that you’re certainly not going to be able to hear it consistently, but all the same dithering is the correct thing to do when exporting to a fixed point format. So, there’s a 24 bit option, because that’s correct. You may feel that you can pick up on subtle improvements exporting through this, even monitoring at 24 bit through this: depends on how sensitive you are to things way below the threshold of consistent observation.
Both are free, so if you’d like to try monitoring through boutique dither at 24 bit nothing’s stopping you :)