I just got myself an audigy 2 and have changed foobars output to 24 bit, I am wondering if this is affecting the quality of my 16bit Monkey's audio files in a negative way. I currently have Dithering enabled, and have seen in changes to 0.53 that if the input and output are the same dithering is disabled on losseless formats. My files are 16bit and my output is 24bit is dithering working on my files? I am currently running 0.6 Beta 7.

Also does playing my 16 bit monkeys audio files at 24bit affect the playback quality at all?

I have just seen this listed in the changes in 0.6

Dithered output is no longer bit-identical to source lossless format

Does this answer my dithering question? Sounds like it but I am not completely sure.

Thanks

Ryan

Audigy cards resample internally. This means that you will never get bit-identical playback for 44.100 kHz audio files.

IIRC, with Audigy2 you will achieve the best quality by resampling to 96 kHz and using 24-bit dithered output.


Earlier versions of foobar could decode lossless formats bit-identically even with dither enabled (I'm speculating here, but it was probably done by automatically disabling dithering if output bit depth was set to 16 bit and the source was a lossless file).

Nope, upsampling to 96000 will not give *any* quality improvements.
You should use resampler set to 48000 since Audigy2 can't handle less than that.