Dithering has similar importance in digital audio. Dithered 8-bit audio sounds way better than non-dithered (harsh artifacts are replaced with tolerable white noise, and quiet details are preserved). Higher end digital equipment even applies dithering to high-bit samples, as do plug-ins in digital audio workstations.
Audio dithering typically involves adding a small amount of noise before downconverting to lower resolution samples.
But there's another form of audio dithering that uses error diffusion (like TFA describes) rather than adding noise. If you use a single-bit ADC but sample much faster than Nyquist and keep track of your errors with error diffusion, you preserve all the audio information in the original with a similar number of bits as a (e.g.) 16-bit ADC sampled at Nyquist, but with the additional benefit that your sampling noised has moved above the audible range where it can be filtered out with an analog lowpass filter.
This is one-dimensional dithering but in the audio world it's called Sigma-Delta modulation or 1-bit ADC.
Critically, the benefits of audio dithering come with a single side-effect (i.e. audible artefact): an increase in the noise floor. In most cases, however, this elevated noise floor remains below the threshold of audibility, or more practically, quieter than the ambient noise of any reasonable listener’s playback environment.
What's important to appreciate is that dithering digital audio should only ever be performed when preparing a final export for distribution, and even then, only for bit-perfect copies. You shouldn't dither when the next step is a lossy codec. Encoders for AAC and Opus accept high bit depth originals, because their encoded files don't have a native "bit depth". They generate and quantise (compress) MDCT coefficients. When these encoded files are decoded to 16-bit PCM during playback, the codec injects "masking noise" which serves a similar function to dither.
