Review: Decimort2 Bit Crusher Plugin by D16 Group

D16 Group DECIMORT2 Review

In this review, we will be going over the D16 Decimort 2, a high-quality bit crusher plugin to get those Lo-Fi (low fidelity) effects that you were used to hearing from audio gear from days gone by in the land of yesteryear.

So, What is bit crushing? Well, firstly you would need to know a little bit about sample rate and bit depth. When recording music in the digital realm our computers record and playback audio one step at a time and the rate at which this is happening is called the sample rate. This is where 41KHz, 48 KHz, 96 KHz .etc comes, from this is the resolution at which our audio is captured along the way.

Now for bit depth as I said with sample rate our computers record the audio one step at a time at a very fast rate and each step switches on and off or in binary terms 1 and 0. Our computers do this for anything a computer does, even we talk about text, images or audio. These 1’s and 0’s are the bits and our computers can handle many strings of these bits at a time. As we all should know there are 8 bits in a byte and 16 bits in two bytes and so on, one or two bytes compose a word, for sixteen bits (two bytes) this means that there are 16 digits in a word for 24 bit 24 digits and so on.

So what does this really mean for our audio? Well, the higher the numbers of bits are the more precise and clear is the sound.

Ok, so now let’s turn to Decimort 2 and figure out why you would use a plugin like this. Well in today’s music we are all recording in pretty high sample rates and bit depths giving us clearer sound than ever before but in ye olden times this was not the case. Vintage samplers and other audio devices recorded and played back at a much lower rate giving the music a distinct crunchy feel. You can hear this especially in the music in older video games.

With Decimort 2 you can change the sample rate and bit depth while you are playing with your music allowing you to dial in the amount of crunchiness with the resampler knob and quantizer display and that is mostly all you can do using the stock plugins in your DAW.

But D16 have added a bit more to Decimort 2 than your standard plugins like dithering, analogue style filters, jitter, preamp and dry wet knob to mix it all neatly with your original signal.

In Decimort 2 you will find allot more than your usual stock plugins as there are over a hundred presets you can choose from to get you started and these emulate the circuits found in older samplers and other vintage audio gear.

With the Dithering knob from the bottom left you can add the amount of dithering you need in your signal. What is dithering? Well as you reduce the bit depth you are reducing the amount of values available to measure the amplitude of your signal this squares of your waveform and adds distortion so to counter this we add noise to the signal which is “dither”.

In Decimort 2 you also have a filter set of LP, BP, HP or BR which can be set to pre or post mode meaning that it can be either set before the bit reduction or after giving a different tone to your crushing effects. Experimenting with this can produce some fun effects.

In Decimort 2 then you will find allot more than your usual stock plugins as there are over a hundred presets you can choose from to get you started and these emulate the circuits found in older samplers and other audio gear.

With the dithering controler, you can add the amount of dithering you need in your signal.

In Decimort 2 you also have a filter set of LP, BP, HP or BR which can be set to pre or post mode meaning that it can be either set before the bit reduction or after giving a different tone to your crushing effects. Experimenting with this can produce some fun effects.

In Decimort 2 you also have an approximate filter setting and an images filter setting these are both optionally activated. The approximate filter is set before all the bit reduction and removes parts or all of the harmonic frequency content over the Nyquist frequency. The Images are the artifacts resulting from the resampler’s activity and with the images filter you can remove these if you need to.

So in conclusion, Decimort 2 has quite a few extras that you won’t find in your standard DAW bit reduction plugins and does it quite allot better to the sound quality of the plugin. Also, this plugin is great and does a nice job of recreating the ye olden samplers and audio gear of yesteryear.

I was trying to get a reverb to sound more’ vintage’ and wasn’t getting the way I wanted, but this D16 Decimort 2 plug-in made it quite easy and I was very pleased with the results. It is also not too pricey as most of D16’s products and is a great tool to have in your producing tool chest.

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Pros:

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• Lots of presets
• Good emulation of older gear
• Not too pricey
• Light on CPU
• Easy to use

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Cons:

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• I don’t see any cons to having this plugin. It’s cheap, it works well and sounds good so yea…

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Decimort2 is available for both Windows and MAC in VST, AU, AAX plugin formats (32bit or 64bit) and can be purchased directly from D16 Group web-store or from PluginBoutique.com, our trusted partner and best plugin-store on Internet.

More Details/Buy Link: D16 Decimort2