The Use of Digital Audio Workstations and the Impact on Music

Abstract

The impact that the Digital Audio Workstation has made on recorded sound is almost incalculable. It completely revolutionised popular music and then quickly moved across into the classical music sphere, making tape recorders redundant. Today, everything is recorded directly to digital files upon either a portable recording device or a computer. The quality of the analogue to digital convertors (ADC) used, either within a portable device or a computer interface, will largely determine the quality of the captured and sampled audio. The ADCs used in inexpensive portable devices are unlikely to have the same quality as those specialised devices which might cost 20 or 30 times more, even if the specifications seem similar. Computer programmes (DAWs) will also sound slightly different from each other, depending upon how they manipulate the digital file. These issues will be discussed.