You always want the best for your audio, so you always work in the highest practical sample bit depth. Problem is, you eventually need to put your soon-to-be-top-10 single on a CD, and CDs only support 16-bit samples. By truncating your 24-bit or higher audio tracks to 16-bit, you are inevitably losing quality and introducing bad noise called quantization distortion.

Dither is the way to take control of the quantization noise The noise will happen, and dither can control where the noise goes. MBIT+ employs psychoacoustic methods to distribute the noise into less audible ranges. The result is a more pleasing sound, smoother fades, and a better chance to make the top 10.

The easiest way to understand dither is to see it. Check out the images to the right, and although both 1-bit images are worse, the dithered one is considerably better.

MBIT+ was specifically designed for musical program material. As our perception of the end result is the most important metric of quality, we built all of our models using real music -- and not test tones, hisses, hums, bleeps, and buzzes. The result is the most musical and sonically pleasing dither available.

Sound card drivers


Professional audio production, broadcast (editors, mastering, trackers, file format converters)


Audio encoders, codecs, decoders


D/A converters

Dither can be counterintuitive -- I'm introducing noise to make it sound better? To help demystify dither, we put together a more extensive guide to understanding and using dither, covering everything from a triangular probability density function (TPDF) to how to use dither in some popular audio applications.

iZotope Dither Guide

MBIT+ dither is commercially available in iZotope Ozone 3. To try it out, download the demo of the Ozone 3 plug-in.

iZotope Ozone 3

Control the noise shaping amount


Autoblanking to disable dither during digital silence


Control overall amount of dither introduced


Specific models for 44.1kHz, 96kHz, 192kHz


Psychoacoustic models based on extensive musical listening


Low-latency and processor-efficient operation designed for high performance, realtime environments

For more information on incorporating iZotope's technology into your application or device, please submit your contact information and a short description of the project.

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