With dither enabled, the location of the input signal on the transfer curve is randomly varied with the low-level random dither signal. In this way, the ADC is not always operating on a non-linear region of the transfer curve. At the output, the dither signal is subtracted before transmission of the digital output word, resulting in a clean output spectrum. This large reduction in distortion has a small penalty of a slight increase in the noise floor, which can increase SNR by no more than 0.5dB.

