Dithering option seems to be working in the opposite way.

Hi SteveG,

Actually, I did recognize the thread you mentioned before posting my query here to wider experts. 🙂

Notice that "extremely small gain (-90 dB)" is actually coming from there. But looks to me still not working as it says (but in the opposite way). 

"I think what you're looking for is to get a signal that is quantized to 16-bit or 24-bit PCM without dither.  I tried this out a few ways, and I think I came across what I would agree with is a bug. Nonetheless, you can accomplish what you want. Here's the two paths where I think it makes a difference:

(A) Create a new file, but choose the bit depth to be 16-bit. What this does is automatically choose "16-bit" when you do File > Save, for the data type of the file, but also shows you 16-bit-quantized sample values in the vertical ruler (shown above). When you then Generate Tones, the signal will always be generated with 32-bit floats (we don't know what the user will save as later or what sort of processing they want to do, so we choose the highest precision we have).  Upon saving, or even File > Save As... and checking that dither was disabled, I noticed that the resulting file still seemed to be  dithered. I would consider this a bug when doing File > Save As... and explicitly checking that dither was disabled.

(B) Instead of creating a new file labeled 16-bit, just choose 32-bit Float (I agree that this is non-intuitive). Then save as you wish (or use Convert Sample Type) and ensure in either case that dither is disabled. In this workflow, we honor the no-dither setting and I end up with 16-bit quantized sample values when I generate a 440 Hz sine wave at -90.308998699194359 dBFS (about 15-bits of precision). I end up with what I think you're going for."

Thanks,

HP Lee