The Audio Expert; Everything You Need to Know About Audio; Third Edition by Ethan Winer & Michael Lawrence

Author:Ethan Winer & Michael Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2026-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Other Distortion Effects

Another type of distortion effect is bit-depth reduction, sometimes called bit crushing. These are always in the form of plug-ins that work in a DAW host or other audio editor program. With this type of distortion you specify the number of output data bits. Bit-reduction effects are used mainly for intentionally low-fi productions, and in this application the bit-reduced audio is not dithered, adding truncation distortion as well as reducing resolution.

I used the freeware Decimate plug-in to let viewers of my AES Audio Myths YouTube video hear how the audio quality of music degrades as the bit depth is reduced to below 16 bits. The video demo “other_effects” contains part of a cello track I recorded for a friend’s pop tune to understand the relationship between what you hear and the number of bits used at that moment as shown on the screen. It starts at 16 bits, then transitions smoothly down to only 3 bits by the end. Cellos are rich in harmonics, so on this track the effect becomes most noticeable when the bit depth is reduced to below 8 bits.

The Aphex Aural Exciter was already described in Chapter 3, and I explained there how to emulate the effect using EQ and distortion plug-ins. It’s mentioned here again only because it adds a subtle trebly distortion to give the impression of added clarity, so it too falls under the category of distortion effects.

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