Mercy, kdrewlo, you're diving pretty deep into the hardware aspects of this and you are on a primarily software forum. I think I understood most of what you are saying. If you try to save a sound clip starting with "Save File As...", and you leave the default choice of Wave for the "Save as type:" field, then you get a bunch of choices for the flavor of Wave file. If you look in the "Format:" field, it offers a bunch of choices some of which I have heard of and some I have not. Most don't sound like Wave formats to me. But if you leave it as the default choice of "PCM", then there are all the choices in the "Attributes:" field. There is an 8 bit, 8KHz choice there, is that what you were looking for? It's pretty crappy sound quality, but it sounds like what you are asking for.
Ohhh.... But then you said you needed a format to import into your source code.... All these files are binary files. Do you have tools to give you a hex dump in some text format that you can paste into your firmware source?
Bob Hickling in Princeville, HI