  In this investigation, we examine how the precision of energy spectra and
scattering phase shifts, extracted in lattice QCD, depend upon the degree of
distillation type smearing. We use the variational method to extract energy
spectra for the isospin-1, $J^{PC}=1^{--}$ channel and use the L\"{u}scher
method to compute scattering amplitudes, relevant for the $\rho$ resonance, in
$\pi\pi$ elastic scattering. Optimised interpolating operators for a single
ground state pion are constructed and these are used to construct two pion
operators. Calculations are performed on an anisotropic lattice with a pion
mass of $m_\pi=236$ MeV. We provide a comprehensive comparison of energy
spectra and scattering phase shifts across distillation spaces of varying rank.
