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by Nition 928 days ago
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

1 comments

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...
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