The primary driver behind the decades-long effort to develop digital audio technology was the promise of pristine, super-accurate audio recordings, free from the hiss, noise and distortion caused by even the most highly spec’d analogue equipment. It is therefore ironic that, upon reaching those longed-for sunlit uplands of sonic perfection, we took one look around and said, “Oh, isn’t it bland! Can we have our distortion back please?”.
There are of course many different varieties of distortion – tape saturation, valve overdrive, transistor overdrive, bit crushing – each with its
