Electro Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher

The Electro Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher enables your guitar or bass to reproduce those lo-fi sounds beloved by fans of ‘80s games consoles. Sample- and bit-rate reduction capabilities produce a range of old school sounds, while a clever Sample Rate Tuning Mode allows the sample rate to be set to match the key of a song.

The Electro Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher is now available from Merchant City Music, online and in our Glasgow store. We are Glasgow’s longest-established guitar specialist, stocking a huge range of EHX pedals. We ship fast to the UK, Europe and Worldwide.

Electro Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher

Buzz. Beep and bloop. We’re high on the lo-fi sounds of “old-school” games, toys and terminals and the Electro-Harmonix 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.

The Mainframe Bit Crusher 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 artefacts created when higher frequencies are sampled at an inadequate rate and the result is distortion. The Mainframe’s sample rate range is wide enough to take you from sounds that are quite pristine to sounds that are unrecognisable 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 to bring us back to those nasty “old school” sounds we love.

The Mainframe’s selectable High/Low/Band-Pass filter lets the user shape the artefacts of the bit crushing and sample rate. Another very cool feature is its Sample Rate Tuning Mode where the pedal analyses 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!