Audio Damage Kombinat Dva Upgrade User Manual
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are chopped off at zero. If you turn them both all the way up you won’t hear much of
any effect because the clipping levels are both set beyond the peaks of the wave. (You
will hear clipping nonetheless if you crank up the signal enough with the gain knob.)
WARP: The WARP type, technically speaking, distorts the signal by using a sinusoid as a non-
linear transfer function. In less technical terms, it makes odd noises by wrapping the
signal around a sine wave. It creates harsh distortion that can sound like hard clipping,
or add metallic-sounding overtones somewhat like ring modulation.
WARP has a single knob, FREQ, which varies the frequency of the sine wave, and
hence varies the timbre of the distorted signal.
BITZ: The BITZ engine type applies several different forms of digital signal destruction. BITZ
creates the popular “lo-fi” sample-rate reduction and bit-crusher digital effects we’ve all
come to know and love despite having 24-bit audio converters and 64-bit signal-
processing math readily available to us.
BITZ has three knobs. The first knob, RATE, controls a sample-rate reducer. As you
turn this knob up, the signal is resampled at a lower rate than your host’s current
sampling rate. If this knob is turned all the way anti-clockwise, the resampling process
has no effect on the signal. As you turn the knob up, the signal is sampled at a lower
rate. If you turn this knob all the way clockwise, the signal is sampled at 1/100
th
of
your host’s sampling frequency (e.g., 441Hz if you use the usual sampling frequency of
44100Hz). You may find that the RATE knob has the most noticeable effect when used
in the high-frequency-band processing engine, since higher frequencies will be affected
first by lowering the sampling rate.
The second knob, BITS, controls a bit-depth reduction or “bit-crushing” process. If you
leave the knob turned fully anti-clockwise, the signal is passed with full resolution.
(Kombinat uses 32 bits to represent signals internally, but your host software may use
16, 24, or 32 bits.) As you rotate the knob, the number of bits used to represent the
signal first drops to 16, and then decreases all the way to one as you turn the knob
fully clockwise.
The third knob, ERR, is an Audio Damage original. It introduces errors in the bits used
to represent the signal. The knob controls how long the errors persist, and hence how
much they damage the audio. If the knob is rotated fully anti-clockwise, no errors are