Digital Audio - History of Digital Audio Use in Commercial Recording

History of Digital Audio Use in Commercial Recording

See also: Digital recording

Pulse-code modulation was invented by British scientist Alec Reeves in 1937 and was used in telecommunications applications long before its first use in commercial broadcast and recording. Commercial digital recording was pioneered in Japan by NHK and Nippon Columbia, also known as Denon, in the 1960s. The first commercial digital recordings were released in 1971.

The BBC also began to experiment with digital audio in the 1960s. By the early 1970s they had developed a 2-channel recorder, and in 1972 they deployed a digital audio transmission system that linked their broadcast center to their remote transmitters.

The first 16-bit PCM recording in the United States was made by Thomas Stockham at the Santa Fe Opera in 1976, on a Soundstream recorder. An improved version of the Soundstream system was used to produce several classical recordings by Telarc in 1978. The 3M digital multitrack recorder in development at the time was based on BBC technology. The first all-digital album recorded on this machine was Ry Cooder's Bop till You Drop in 1979. British record label Decca began development of their own 2-track digital audio recorders in 1978, and released the first European digital recording in 1979.

Popular digital multitrack recorders produced by Sony and Mitsubishi in the early 1980s helped to bring about digital recording's acceptance by the major record companies. The 1982 introduction of the CD popularized digital audio with consumers.

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