What ? ! That ' s completely wrong . Bits in audio have nothing to do with frequency , but with the dynamic . In audio signal processing , you could see the dynamic as the equivalent of a pixel more bits means a more detailed sound frequency would be the equivalent of color . The bit depth is an important value for the dynamic , the sampling frequency is important for the frequencies . 8 bits means as many bits are allocated to the dynamic values , so 28 256 values of dynamic are possible . Nowadays , files usually have a 16 bits dynamic , so a dynamic range of 65536 values . Basically , a lot more . Long story short your explanation is complete nonsense , and I have no idea where you pulled that from . Edit For more on audio bit depth , follow uhank 81 ' s link . For more about 8 bit music , it ' s that way .