Does DITHER explain Analog vs Digital preference?


I came across a CD Digital track with a synthetic added hiss and pop like a turntable. It was added by the sound engineer for "effect", however, it still sounded remarkably good. The hiss and crackle background noise seemed to make the music stand out even further than usual and gives it a life-like real world feel. This may be analogous to a contrasting frame around artwork that enhances the colors within the painting/photo.

I looked through my collection and I have at least a dozen CD tracks, usually pop music, mixed with intentionaly added wideband background noise. These all sounded good... although the higher background noise can be annoying if you allow yourself to focus on it.

This lead me to thinking about how a significant number of audiophiles prefer Vinyl or Analog sources over Digital: Would the Analog audiophile enjoy these "noisy" CD's more than a conventional CD mix with a very low noise floor?

Following this logic leads to a possible explanation for some peoples strong preference of noisy Analog over the technology of Digital.

Could it all be in the DITHER?

In Digital signal processing a technique called "dithering" is used to improve the accuracy of the signal. The idea is simple....a low level of high frequency noise is added in order to improve the accuracy of the conversion of the primary signal. The high frequency noise, which is outside the audible band, is later filtered out in the processing chain, leaving only the more accurately converted primary signal.

It seems plausible that a small level of background noise might actualy raise the ability of listeners to perceive certain low level details within the music. Without this added noise then some of the low level detail simply falls below a threshold of human perception and goes unnoticed. In an analogy to Digital processing, the human brain might actually extract the low level detail from the noise by performing the final processing step of stripping out the wideband noise; the listener simply "focusses" on the music.
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Showing 1 response by shadorne

I am not sure I made my self clear in the intial post;

As described by Gs5556, dither allows quantization of a low level signal to occur in the digital processing because it artifically raises the signal above the threshold of the least significant bit in a digital system.

I fully agree with replies from Gs5556 and others that a higher wideband noise floor is very different from dither, however, different though it may be, might a low level wideband noise raise the audibility of some low level musical details enough to take it above a human perception threshold? (above a kind of human quantization threshold)

An analogy might be a TV fed with a very low level of brightness in the input signal... so low that some low level details are lost in what are perceived as large completely dark parts of the screen. Adding a low level wideband noise signal to the same input signal of the TV would create a slight snowy appearance, just a shade or two above totaly dark, in the darkest parts of the screen. The question is whether this random low level wideband noise might allow a viewer to better discern some previsouly hidden detail in these dark parts of the screen?