Development of Music Technology Through the 1980s, multi-track recorders became digital, using a variety of technologies and media

types. These include digital tape format (such as ADAT) or minidiscs. The first software-based digital multi-track recorder, called Deck, was released in 1990. The advantages of digital recording are: digital recorders record higher frequencies; CD quality audio is sampled at 44.1 kHz; Digital filters can be made to objectively perform better than analogue components; no need to rewind using DAW. Digital synthesisers: uses digital processors, offer more features, sampling and additive synthesis are not feasible in analogue synthesizers. Producing and mixing used to be performed on large machines such as rack mounted equipment known as hardware. Over the past 20 years Digital Audio Workstations e.g. Logic, Pro Tools have allowed mixing to be performed on computers. With the recent access to technology, many people have become bedroom producers. This has given rise to in the box mixing; this refers to doing the mix completely within a computer, using a programme such as Pro Tools or Logic. Most of the concepts are exactly the same to out of the box mixing. Software plug-in effects are far less costly than the equivalent hardware boxes. For example if you want to use a compressor for 10 tracks, you could just buy/download it and insert it as many time as you like. Generally, home studio equipment comes at a low cost. By the end of the 1970s, electronic musical devices were becoming increasingly common and affordable in North America, Europe and Japan. Engineers developed a Universal Synthesizer Interface, which would allow direct communication between equipment from different manufacturers. MIDI's development was announced to the public by Robert Moog, and was published in August 1983. MIDI allows an easier manipulation of sound e.g. quantizing, velocity changes etc. Digital recording allows digital audio to be recorded to a storage device as a stream of 1s and 0s. The analogue signal is transmitted from the input device to an analogueto-digital converter (ADC). Sample rate defines the number of samples per unit of second, measured in Hz. The higher the sampling rate the higher the upper cutoff frequency of the digitized audio signal. The then outputted 1s and 0s are stored onto recording media such as magnetic tape, hard drive etc. Advantages of digital recording over analogue include avoiding hiss caused by layering tracks in analogue recording and higher sample rates. In 1975, American sound engineer Tomlinson Holman coined the term 5.1 to describe the internationally standardised surround format for sound with accompanying pictures. This specification formed the basis of the home cinema market for loudspeaker placement and hence channels allocation. There is stereo format both with and without separate woofers, 5.1 surround sound with and without inbuilt low frequency capability for the surround loudspeakers and with or without sub-woofers. There have been efforts to improve surround formats, usually involving channel creep. Previous stereo and 5.1 systems rendered sound in the round without height information. Height channels and loudspeakers were first introduced with the cinema trials of the 10.2 format in 2000. 10.2 also addressed identified weaknesses in 5.1 including panning gaps and vague rear placement.