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Dandolin wrote:so, I played around with the demo widget for the OC-5 on Boss' website. I liked the suboctaves pretty much across the board, but I tended to turn the octave up as far down as allowable or off. Really can't see any advantage to that aspect over my ancient PS-2, which is not particularly less "real" sounding, but is just a touch weirder to its advantage, imo. To be fair to Boss, though, I feel this way about every digital octave up.

Pepe wrote:Well, I'll try this out when I get it. The octave up sound in the poly mode wasn't really pleasing to my ears, either. We'll see!

Dowi wrote:I don't know why they never put a simple LPF knob on this kind of pedals, it's a small addition but would be really useful to cut off some of that digital high frequencies.

brak purp wrote:I can't take anymore of this shim-sham. May we degrade.

cantremember wrote:That looks cool! Any demos out there yet?

The Mainframe Bit Crusher pedal creatively degrades the sound to bring us back to those nasty “old school” sounds we love. Buzz. Beep and bloop. Electro Harmonix is high on the lo-fi sounds of “old-school” games, toys and terminals and the Mainframe Bit Crusher takes us back in time to when Pac Man and Donkey Kong ruled the arcades, to when the Commodore 64 was high tech.

Electro Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher Pedal Features

Sample Rate Reduction ranging from 48kHz to 110Hz
Bit Depth Reduction ranging from 24-bit to 1-bit
Selectable High/Low/Band-Pass filter to shape the artifacts of the bit crushing and sample rate reduction
Sample Rate Tuning Mode allows you to set the sample rate to match the key of a song, or continually adjust the sample rate to based on what you play on your instrument
Programmable preset or expression pedal setting allows you to save your sound or control any combination of the Mainframe’s knobs with an external expression pedal
Secondary knob parameters allow you to fine-tune the Mainframe’s functioinality and effect.
High quality buffered bypass and silent switching
Comes equipped with an Electro-Harmonix 9.6DC-200mA power supply

It provides sample rate reduction ranging from 48kHz to 110Hz. A little background… the sample rate is the number of times per second that a sample or snapshot of an analog signal is taken. For example, CDs (remember them?) had a sample rate of 44.1kHz which means that the original analog signal is sampled 44,100 times per second.

The sample rate defines the frequency range that can be reproduced while maintaining good fidelity. When the sample rate is reduced the quality of the audio is degraded and aliasing occurs. Aliasing means audible artifacts created when higher frequencies are sampled at an inadequate rate and the result is frequency dependent distortion. The Mainframe’s sample rate range is wide enough to take you from sounds that are quite pristine to sounds that are unrecognizable when compared to the input signal.

It also provides bit crushing ranging from 24-bit to 1-bit. What does that mean? Bit crushing is bit depth reduction. Back to our CD example… CDs used a 16-bit bit depth meaning that each of its samples was represented by 16-bits of information. Higher bit depths can accurately represent a greater dynamic range while bit crushing increases the number of sampling errors and creatively degrades the sound.

The Mainframe’s selectable High/Low/Band-Pass filter lets the user shape the artifacts of the bit crushing and sample rate. Another very cool feature is its Sample Rate Tuning Mode where the pedal analyzes your input signal in real-time and sets the sample rate to match the pitch of your signal, or a set interval above your signal. This allows you to set the sample rate to match the key of a song, or it will continually adjust the sample rate based on what you play!

brak purp wrote:I can't take anymore of this shim-sham. May we degrade.