Typical signal to noise ratio of ADPCM Options

[Neuron]

So, I have decided to return to this forum (despite my little conflict with greynol) and I have kind of a weird question. I would like to know what is the rough SNR of a 4-bit ADPCM recording (IMA and Microsoft). For those curious why I am asking this, well, I like ripping music and sound effects from old games, and I would like know the technical side as well.

[Neuron]

I did an Audacity convert to mono + match both volumes using Amplify + invert one of the track and Mix and render way of subtracting one track from the other. I got a "noise signal", peaking only 11.3 dB below the top. The weird thing is, the quieter parts of the song (not silence, only 9-10 dB below maximum) had "noise" as quiet as -45 dB while the louder parts went up to 11.3 dB. This is not all that is strange, because the "noise" left by the subtraction is actually a recognisable signal of the music, although very noisy (I will post a sample in the uploads section). By contrast, the dithered 8-bit signal is very audibly noisy, but it leaves a normal noise signal at -35.3 dB (which is a bit weird as well as 8-bit sound should have a 48 dB SNR and dithered 42 dB as I used only 1-bits of triangular dither, plus, the original signal is slightly present in the noise as well). The undithered 8-bit signal produces normal random noise at -48.2 dB as expected. Both dithered and undithered 8-bit signal have obvious, strong noise in them, unlike the ADPCM files.

So, how to make sense of this? And why every difference signal except for the non-dithered 8-bit one has recognisable music it it?