[0xdada]

Quoting Brian Eno: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart"

[Nition]

I remember first seeing that quote on a Kotaku article, where they had unfortunately misinterpreted "the crap sound of 8-bit" as referring to retro videogame music made on 8-bit CPUs, rather than (what he was actually referring to) 8-bit audio[0].

[0] i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth

[rob74]

Funnily enough, to get the "crap sound of 8-bit" you usually needed a 16-bit computer (the Amiga). But that's nothing compared to the "crap sound of 1-bit", i.e. playing sampled sound using the PC speaker. I still remember thinking "how is this even possible?!" when I first heard it...

[Nition]

Yeah, it's amazing what you can do with just a 1-bit pulse. You can even do multiple instruments[0] or win the loudness war[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9PfEFw78I

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ANEQu5Lto