No need to apologise Chris :o)

I may have confused you with the term "1-bit A/D", but this is exactly what a comparator is and it's also exactly what you need.

As for conversion speed: that depends on which devices you compare. The Cygnal devices have built-in ADCs that can do up to 100 ks/s, which is ten times as fast as the ADC0804. However, Maxim makes an ADC that can convert up to 1.5 Gs/s (yes, that's 1500 million samples/second!).

Regards,
Rob.