Bitcrusher

The resulting quantization noise may produce a "warmer" sound impression, or a harsh one, depending on the amount of reduction.

As the sample rate is reduced, high frequencies are aliased or, if the digital signal is first low-pass filtered, they are lost.

At extreme reductions, the waveform becomes metallic sounding as a result of severe aliasing and perhaps nonlinear distortion from poorly tuned digital-to-analog conversion.

(Note that all of these effects are avoidable if the signal is low-pass filtered before being downsampled and if the DAC parameters for playback are proper to the reduced sample rate; then the waveform just sounds band-limited like a telephone, an AM radio with clear reception, or a magnetic tape recorder at a slow tape speed.)

DAWs today typically use 32-bit floating-point numbers, because they are more suitable for successive layered processing and mixing, but the final master output usually consists of 16-bit or 24-bit integer samples.

As the bit depth goes down, waveforms become more noisy and subtle volume variations are lost, reducing dynamic range at the low end.

LossyWAV software by David Robinson and Nick Currie calculates the minimum bit depth to represent each segment of a PCM waveform without audible distortion.

Though it is intended as a preprocessor for reducing bit rates in audio compression, pushing the quality setting lower produces bitcrush distortion.