WEISS Vesta Owner's Manual page 13

OWNERS MANUAL FOR WEISS VESTA FIREWIRE INTERFACE
domain. Think of digital equalizers, digital volume controls, upsamplers, digital pre-amplifiers,
decoders for encoded signals on DVD etc. All those applications perform some mathematical
operations on the digital audio signal. This in turn causes the wordlength of the signal to be
increased. E.g. an input signal to an upsampler may have a wordlength of 16 bits (off a CD), but
the output signal of the upsampler may have 24 bits or even more. This comes from the fact that
the mathematical operations employed in such devices increase the word length. E.g. a
multiplication of two 2 digit numbers results in a four digit number. So after the upsampler the
word length may be higher than the subsequent processor may be able to accept. In this example,
after the upsampler there may be a D/A converter with a 24 bit input word length capability. So if
the upsampler generates a word length of more than 24 bits it should be dithered to 24 bits for
maximum signal fidelity.
I hope these excursions into the theory and practice of audio engineering have been useful for you.
If you would like to dive further into those issues I recommend to visit the website of Mr. Bob Katz,
a renowned Mastering Engineer and a Weiss Engineering customer. He publishes articles on
Dithering and Jitter and many other topics at http://www.digido.com/
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Page: Date: 10/08 /dw