Audio pros have never been afraid to embrace the future, and the past three decades marked an era of enormous technological upheaval. 1977 was a significant year in terms of audio technology, and that revolution continues to this day.

With that in mind, we revisited 10 major movements that shaped pro recording since '77. These are listed in no particular order because selecting one as more important than another would be just plain silly, and listing them in an exact chronological sense is impossible. Also note that, like any great piece of gear, our story actually goes up to 11.

Smallish reference speakers (such as Auratones) did exist before 1977, but that year Ed Long introduced the MDM-4 Near-Field Monitor^™ with its then-revolutionary concept of near-field speakers. No one could have predicted the impact his Near-Field Monitor would have on studios for decades to come. A year later, Yamaha debuted the NS-10. Although a failure with consumers, it eventually found favor among studio users as a reference comparable to small home hi-fis and car stereos. Later products, such as the Meyer HD-1 and Genelec 1031, showed that the near-field approach had gained enough acceptance to be used in serious audio tools.

At AES Paris in 1977, SSL introduced its 4000A Series console with onboard “Studio Computer,” and the race was on, with automation — mostly VCA-based, but also moving fader systems — eventually becoming a common sight on the studio landscape. The first large-scale digital console — the Neve DSP — appeared in 1982, and a decade later Capricorn, Neve's commercial digital console, arrived. Yet analog showed no signs of letting go, whether it was the 1984 TAC Scorpion, Neve's 1986 mega-hit V Series or Harrison's Series 10/12, with digital-controlled automation of all functions. Digitally controlled analog also found lasting success in the 1988 debut of the Euphonix Crescendo.

Everything changed in 1995, with Yamaha's compact 02R digital 8-bus (D8B), offering 40 inputs on remix, with moving faders, instantaneous reset, dynamics on every channel and onboard effects — all for $10,000. Meanwhile, the onscreen power of DAWs and the popularity of mixing “in the box” drove the need for combination console/workstation controllers, from smaller Yamaha boards to SSL's large-format Duality. The market wasn't unnoticed by Digidesign, which began a long-term controller development project in the late 1990s, leading to its ProControl, Control|24 and eventually ICON products. Today, the market is wide open, with consoles small and large — analog, digital, DAW controllers and hybrids.

In 1977, analog multitracks were well-established, with 2-inch decks from Ampex, MCI, Otari, Scully, Stephens, Studer and 3M, and smaller-format machines from Fostex, Tascam, Otari and Dokorder. A year later, 3M showed its $115,000 digital machine, which recorded 32 tracks (16-bit/50kHz) on 1-inch tape at 45 ips. Mitsubishi countered with its own 32-track PD (ProDigi) format shared by Otari. And with Sony's DASH (Digital Audio Stationary Head) ½-inch, 24-track standard, the format wars were off and running. DASH emerged as the winner, helped mainly by the development of the $240,000-plus dual-density DASH decks that recorded 48 tracks on that same ½-inch tape and could play sessions from their digital 24-track cousins.

Neither PD nor DASH 2-tracks gained much ground, with most studios mixing to analog 2-track. What did catch the attention of pros was the consumer DAT digital tape format in 1987. It was fairly inexpensive, but became embroiled in years of RIAA attempts to legislate copy-code circuits to prevent home CD taping. Years later, consumer DAT decks (equipped with Serial Copy-Management System) arrived, but by then DAT had failed as a home format, with the net effect of SCMS making it difficult for bands using home digital equipment to create backups of their own works.

Today, 2-inch analog is used less as a recording medium, but has enjoyed a resurgence as an effects device for recording rhythm tracks and transferring to a workstation for overdubs, editing and mixing.

The 1982 advent of the CD brought consumers a convenient, novel and decent-quality medium, but also ushered profound changes into pro audio. This new format required entirely different production, mastering and replication methods. Suddenly, premastering/tape editing services sprung up as a new industry, while phrases like “PQ coding” and “1610 master” became part of the lingo. And the price of a CD plant in the early 1980s was simply astronomical — unlike vinyl pressing, the cost of a replication facility was beyond the means of the average business.

CD mastering bore little resemblance to vinyl mastering, with its nuances of groove pitch and depth, and working with RIAA EQ curves. In the studio, the CD opened up new possibilities. With no side A/B hassles, tracks could be recorded of any length — even extending the LP's usual 40-minute limit. And mixing for CD was an anything-goes affair: Bass-heavy signals could be panned anywhere in the soundstage, something that would never occur on a vinyl release. Yet years later, the convention for center-panning bass guitar and kick drum remains. Old habits die hard.

Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, wasn't the first sequencing platform for electronic musical instruments. But as a non-manufacturer-specific standard, it's remarkable that it still exists and thrives today — some 24 years after its birth. MIDI's origins stem from Sequential Circuits' founder Dave Smith, who presented a 1981 AES paper for a Universal Synthesizer Interface based on his meetings with Tom Oberheim and Roland's Ikutaro Kakehashi.

In a rare example of cooperation, competing companies worked together to refine USI into the more powerful MIDI standard, culminating in a public demonstration of MIDI at Winter NAMM 1983. As computers became affordable and more powerful, MIDI became a staple in studios, along with growing racks of synths, drum machines, sequencers and samplers, with control rooms expanding to house all of this gear.

Opcode shook the pro audio world with Studio Vision (1990), a program that combined MIDI sequencing with the digital audio capability of Digidesign's Sound Tools. Audio data showed up as tracks of waveforms and could be manipulated as easily as MIDI tracks in a conventional sequencer. The concept caught on, and other digital sequencers — such as MOTU's Digital Performer, Steinberg's Cubase Audio, Emagic's Logic Audio and Cakewalk Audio — entered the market.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that decent acoustics didn't exist prior to 1983. But the early days of facility design were driven by intuition, luck and trial-and-error. All that changed in 1983 when Crown's Techron division unveiled the TEF System 10, the first portable Time-Delay Spectrometry analyzer/acoustical measurement system. Licensed using Richard Heyser's 1967 TDS concepts, TEF included energy-time curves and could show complex waterfall displays of audio spectra, allowing, for the first time, complex on-site measurements of systems and spaces from a commercially available product.

At the time, available acoustical treatments were few — mostly absorptive materials such as heavy drapes, perforated wall/ceiling tiles, fabric-covered Fiberglas and a few brands of foam. Coincidentally, as the TEF 10 came to market, acoustician Dr. Peter D'Antonio offered his Reflection Phase Grating (RPG) products, capable of turning a hard reflected sound into a controllable diffuse field. This, along with TEF's ability to measure the effects of sounds striking various surfaces (including consoles), inaugurated the era of modern, science-based studio design.

Traditionally, realistic-sounding artificial reverb was never easy or cheap. Acoustic chambers required a lot of real estate. EMT introduced the plate reverb in 1957 — still fairly large, but far smaller and less expensive than a chamber. In 1976, EMT built the Model 250 — the first commercial digital reverb — but at $20,000 and nearly three feet tall, it wasn't cheap or compact. Lexicon's 1978 Model 224 was more affordable — only $7,400. Other reverbs followed, including the 224X, 224XL, the AMS rmx-16, Quantec Room Simulator, and Eventide's SP-2016 — but the Lexicon PCM60 unveiled in 1984 was the first pro digital reverb priced at less than $1,500.

A year later, the first less-than-$1,000 reverbs debuted from two companies spun off from the breakup of MXR: ART's $995 DR2 and the Alesis XT at $795. In 1986, Yamaha launched the SPX90, a $745 unit that even today is a standard item in studio and touring racks. Affordable DSP had finally arrived.

The term “project studio” has its origins back in the late '70s, with the analog ½-inch, 8-track format bridging the gap between hobby and pro recorders. With careful attention to gain structure, machines like Tascam's 80-8 and the Otari 5050B-8 could produce decent work. In the late '80s, both Fostex and Tascam offered very good-sounding ½-inch 16-tracks, thanks to Dolby S-type noise reduction, a consumer version of its pro Spectral Recording system. And linked to MIDI tracks with a simple FSK sync box, a semi-pro 8- or 16-track rig was capable of nearly anything.

In 1989, newcomer Mackie Designs debuted the CR-1604, a 16-channel mixer, but in an all-metal chassis with an internal power supply and seven aux sends per channel. The concept of a rugged, clean-sounding, affordable console took the industry by surprise, and the process repeated three years later with Mackie's 8•Bus line.

A revolution began on January 18, 1991, when Alesis launched the ADAT, a modular digital multitrack system offering 8-track digital recording on S-VHS tapes, with the ability to interlock multiple transports for up to 128 tracks. The original ADAT was $3,995 — a lot for a digital 8-track in today's terms — but compared to the $100,000-plus reel-to-reel digital 24-tracks of its time, ADAT was a bargain. ADAT had the effect of immediately bringing analog 8/16-track recorder sales to a halt. Affected most by ADAT's arrival, Tascam and Fostex began their own MDM development projects. Alesis went on to sell more than 100,000 ADATs, and digital multitracking was no longer the realm of the rich and famous.

One of the weak links in any home/budget recording was always drums. In 1980, Roger Linn introduced the LM-1 drum computer, the first programmable drum machine with sampled sounds. The term “drum machine” became part of the language, and jobs sprang up for drum machine “programmers.” Other drum machines followed, and with MIDI sequencing, drum editing became easier than ever. Sampling drum machines with onboard sequencing, such as the E-mu SP12 and Akai's MPC60 (and others), opened up a world of music production to both players and nontraditional music creators.

Steinberg ReCycle (designed by Propellerhead Software) kicked off the software revolution in 1994, followed by programs such as Sonic Foundry's ACID (1999), Propellerhead's Reason (2000) and Ableton's Live (2001), each offering tools for looping. Interestingly, while these began as specialized applications for looping functions, some — like ACID and Live — later became more DAW-like. Meanwhile, the more traditional DAW programs — such as SONAR, Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer and Pro Tools — eventually responded to the market by adding more loop-production features.

The digital audio workstation represents the most significant development in the history of digital pro audio. Yet from the earliest software and 8-bit D/A cards for the Apple II in 1977 from Micro Technology Unlimited, the evolution of the DAW was tied to the development of personal computer technology.

Digidesign wasn't the first company out with a DAW, but its launch of Pro Tools in 1991 — priced from $5,995, a fraction of the $100,000-plus New England Digital Direct-to-Disk systems with which it competed — created a stir that continues to this day. Soon, companies such as Waves, Jupiter Systems and Arboretum Systems began developing software add-ons for DAWs. Eventually, the market exploded, with more companies and more supported platforms. Signal processing hasn't been the same since.

Modern workstations — native and hardware-based — combine high resolution and diversity, with a multitude of companies supplying components, both hardware (I/O devices, converters, console-style controllers and peripherals) and software. Ironically, the DAW — once an editing adjunct to the studio — in many cases has become the studio.

We'd be remiss to ignore one development that isn't tied to any single technology — long- distance collaboration. T1 phone lines, fiber optics and satellite uplinks made it possible, and eventually broadband Internet made it convenient. These days, there are few limitations for doing anything long distance. It's a whole new world — although it's shrinking every minute.