What’s “dithering”? And why is it used on CDs?
In: Technology
It’s randomization to prevent undesirable patterns when quantizing something.
For example, when recording sound digitally you measure the sound and give it a value. If you want to reduce the number of samples by half (to make the file smaller) you’d have two samples you need to turn into one. You could round them, or discard one, but because sound is a repeating pattern if you do it the same way every time it creates weird distortions in the sound.
Dithering randomizes these, so instead of a distortion you can hear there’s just a little more noise in the sample that doesn’t really effect how it sounds.
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