[Pokiehat]

You don't lose 48dB of dynamic range. You are never going to get 24 noise free bits even if you have a 24 bit ad converter. The least significant of those bits are just going to be noise. Your mic and mic pre are going to make sure of that.

Also it is possible for the human ear to resolve sound beneath the quietest part of the signal but I guess the point is that 100dB down, the human ear is unlikely to detect any sound whatsoever under normal listening conditions let alone be able to resolve signal from noise at this kind of level. So it all becomes very theoretical and there is a tendency for people to rely on spectrograms where quantisation error can be highly visible provided the y axis extends down far enough and where the program material has very narrow bandwidth. It is most visible using sine wave test tones since the sine wave has no harmonic content. Dither in this case has a highly visible effect in decorrelating the error inherent to the quantisation process but the problem is that under normal listening conditions, the audible artifacts of that error are basically on the threshold of inaudibility anyway. So sometimes it is easy to confuse the magnitude of what we see in spectrograms versus what we can actually hear in the programme material.

I don't want to say that dither is redundant or pointless because its not. Its just something that home recordists shouldn't concern themselves with because in all likelihood they have much bigger problems to be concerned with that have a much more significant affect on the quality of their recordings.

I'm talking things like proper micing technique i.e. elimination of ambient noise and spill using directional mics at the appropriate distance and orientation, elimination of common electrical problems which can produce undesirable and audible noise at normal listening levels i.e. ground loops etc. For the majority of people these are things which are going to result in a bigger improvement in your recordings. Leave the dither to the mastering engineer who is putting the final touches for your cd release. Don't got a mastering engineer or a cd release pending? No big deal. You probably wont be able to tell the difference anyway unless you listen in highly unusual circumstances designed specifically so you can hear the quantization noise/dither.