Hi guys, would love some help if anyone has the time to give this a reply.
I am creating an album for CD release. I have Cubase Pro 10.5 and I know I need to reduce the bit rate to 16 and sample rate to 44.1k.
What I’m not sure about is whether dithering is necessary and if I need to use Cubase’s mastering plug-in UV22HR.
For the record (no pun intended) I cannot hear any difference in quality (as far as I can tell) when I simply export the song at 16 bits without using the UV22HR.
This page has some interesting info about the subject
It is really hard to hear it. Waves as some plugins that can do down to 8 bits.
I use that to select the noise that I think works best. I doubt anyone will ever notice
but it is part of “do your best”. I think you can do something similar manually with normalise to very low level apply it and get it back.
Technically dithering is not necessary if you like truncation noise more, and if you decide to dither, you do not need to use the Cubase´s UV22 HR.
Apart from that, it is hard to “hear” dithering. It´s not that it does change your whole mix, as suggested often on the forums here.
The type of music you make is going to make a big difference. If you’re making acoustic guitar music with long reverb tails you’d want to dither. If you’re making metal dither is not going to make a difference.
It makes sense about the genre - my music is soft rock / indie. And for the most part it’s full instrumentation (drums, bass, guitars, keys etc) so it’d be hard to notice anything.
Still not sure about adding it ‘just because’. What could be heard if I don’t add it?
