What kind of "professional" would that be? Here is the help file for Adobe Audition which supports shaped Guassian and TPDF dither: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Auditio...=WS58a04a822e3e5010548241038980c2c5-7f4c.htmlBob is using unshaped (white) TPDF dither. Though it's one possible 'proper' dither in the mathematical sense, this isn't the dither a professional would use if there were alternatives; even several low-power 'improper' Gaussian dithers will outperform it in practice.
"Usually, Triangular p.d.f. is a wise choice because it gives the best trade?off among SNR (Signal?to?Noise ratio), distortion, and noise modulation. " Yes you can modify the the noise profile some but without proper noise shaping, you are not going to magically solve this problem with 16 bit encoding without noise shaping.
Bob *has* done that. And I noted it in my response to you. This is the graph from Bob's paper:That, and you easily gain 30dB+ at the midrange 'dip' with shaping, which Bob has't done. Most good dithers follow the ATH.

Indeed he spends considerable amount of time discussing this topic. This is noted even in the summary that I post from his paper and repeat here:
"CONCLUSIONS
This article has reviewed the issues surrounding the transmission of high-resolution digital audio. It is
suggested that a channel that attains audible transparency will be equivalent to a PCM channel that
uses:
· 58kHz sampling rate, and
· 14-bit representation with appropriate noise shaping, or
· 20-bit representation in a flat noise floor, i.e. a ‘rectangular’ channel"
I am compelled to think you have not read his paper after all.
But if the capture is done at 24 bits which is usually the case when music is recorded/mixed these days, you would be creating distortion products due to decimation to 16 bits. If you captured and stayed in 16 bit mode then yes. But such is not the case.There's also a good case for using no dither at all. You get two bits back over Bob's figure.