The Third Digital Revolution

Analog Multi-Track Recorder
Victim of The Digital Revolution

During my first undergraduate year in the early 90s, I had some spare time and did a sound engineering course on the weekends. Things were very different then. In the course I learned how to edit music, by actually cutting on the tapes and gluing them together. Back then “Cut and Paste” was more literal.

Every production stage was analogue then. Recording was done to 2” Studder 24 tracker. Mixed using analog mixers, thru analog effects and mastered to analog ½” tape. DAT a two track digital format was starting to get widely used but, purists said it sounded too clean, too clinical, too cold and harsh, so mix masters was still mostly analog.

Then the first digital revolution came. Computing technology that we now take for granted was still maturing then. Unlike Terabytes of today, Hard disks was still counted in Megabytes (still magnitude larger than the 5 Kilobytes cassettes on my first VIC-20 computer, but that’s another story). Products like Alesis ADAT and Fostex D80 and later Pro Tools started to bring in the revolution in digital music recording.