Digital qwestshun....

D-Zyne

Active Member
Hey techies, I think I asked this question (yes I do know how to spell it) recently but it either got lost in the shuffle or I missed the replies....

Sometime ago, I knew what the terms "jitter" and "dither" meant. I know one of them has to do with the digital word length but I forget which one....and I completely forgot what the other one was.

:dunno:
 
Very briefly, jitter has to do with timing errors, and dither has to do with word width reduction.

Slightly greater detail, dither adds a small amount of random noise to help mask signal correlated quantization noise. This is a lot more useful than simply cutting off the excess bits. Signal correlated noise is much more annoying than random noise in a system. Jitter is only important when a real-time conversion is being done, such as A->D or D->A. Completely random jitter isn't too big of a deal, and will manifest itself as a reduction of the S/N ration. Signal correlated jitter is worse (and much more common), depending on the signal it is correlated to.
 
Or in more simple terms...

Dither... fill in the empty spaces so it doesn't look (or sound) blank.

Jitter... :uzi: Shake, shake, shake Senora, shake your body line Shake, shake, shake Senora, shake it all the time :uzi:
 
Back
Top Bottom