The RPS Bit Reactor is a bit crusher and downsampler that takes whatever signal you give it and crunches it up into digital atoms. The central Crush knob selects the number of bits for the crunching, from 1 to 8, while the Sample one deals with reducing the sample rate.
The company participated in our Brooklyn Stompbox Exhibit and our official videographer collector//emitter shot this video of the Bit Reactor.
The Bit Reactor is a hardware bit crusher and downsampler. It has no program or CPU, it digitizes without software. It takes whatever signal you give it and crunches it up into digital atoms.
We live in an analog world, but most of the media that we encounter today is digital: an attempt to reproduce real-world signals with a stream of 1s and 0s.
In the realm of modern electronics there’s plenty enough processing power to create a crystal-clear digital copy of pretty much any analog signal. The Bit Reactor, on the other hand, explores what can happen when we take all that processing power and throw it out the window. Think of an old Atari or NES in all its 8-bit glory and you’ll start to get the idea.
The 8 LEDs surrounding the CRUSH knob each represent a bit; as the knob is turned clockwise, more bits (and LEDs) are activated. Reduce the bits to get anything from a fairly subtle to a super-clipped square wave distortion. Think the glitchy, gated kind of sound from an extreme fuzz and you won’t be far off.
Meanwhile, the SAMPLE control provides even more sonic mayhem, reducing the sampling rate enough to give an audiophile nightmares for weeks. The control of this knob can also be taken over by an expression pedal for hands-free lo-fi bliss.
