When digital audio recorders appeared, they crashed the normal order that existed until then in the music industry. There had been only one type of sound recorder until digital audio recorders. The appearance of the digital audio recorder separated the world into two categories: "digital" and "analog" sounds.

Digital audio avails digital signals in order to get sound reproduction. It includes  digital- to- analog conversion storage, analog- to- digital conversion and transmission. Actually, the system often named digital is really a discrete- level analog, a discrete- time of a previous electrical parallel.

Although modern systems can be pretty discrete in their methods, grace to its inconspicuous (in both amplitude and time) nature, the digital signal's basic usefulness is that it can be corrected without any loss and thus the digital signal can be created again. The secrecy in both amplitude and time is vital to this remaking, because if the amplitude or time had been continuous, the system would have been unavailable.

The history of digital audio begins when an analogue audio signal was chosen for the first time, and then (for PCM, the regular shape of digital audio) switched into binary signals - 'on/off' pulses - that were kept as binary magnetic, electronic or optical signals, rather than as continuous level electronic, continuous time or electromechanical signals. The signal was encoded for fighting against any errors that could appear in the transmission of the signal or the stow. All in all, this codification was for purpose of correcting the errors and is not rigorously a side of digital audio process. This "channel coding" is fundamental to the competence of recorded digital system or broadcast to dodge the loss of bit accuracy. The binary signal's discrete level and time permit a decoder to venture in remaking the analogue signal upon replay.

Rather than in the history of sound recording, the digital recording appeared in telephones and computing areas. Since the 1930s, the telephone companies tried to find means to break up telephone signals from continuous energy flows to small pieces. Their attempt had the purpose of "compressing" the sound and to perfection the sending of multiple signals over one wire. Although it had no business with the development of PCs, somewhere in the 1940s computer engineers have come up with a way to use the magnetic tape as a mean to record digital data.

In the 1950s and later, in the 60s, the ways for transforming the sound into digital bits and gradually recording it on tape reached a point where it could be saved on a high- quality sound digitally.

Strange enough, the record companies did not find any interest in that. Digital tape recorders did not  provide any special advantages over the multi-track analog recorders and it was not possible to design a rather cheap consumer device to be a digital recording.

The television had a major influence over the switch from analog to digital recording in studios. The music industry did not pay attention, yet. In television, digital recorders made a good impression after the 1970s, when they were introduced.

The specialists in the field discovered methods to switch digital video recorders to digital audio recorders. One of the primary digital audio that was available commercially was created after a converted VCR.

The emergence of the Soundstream company was a great part of the story. The engineer Thomas Stockham created a digital audio recorder. He utilized it to record the Santa Fe, New Mexico Symphony Orchestra from 1976. Not many years have passed until the record industry adopted the digital recordings. They were put forth for the master recordings that produced the LP records.

The master recordings for the first CDs were made in 1980. That was possible due to the presentation on a Sony PCM - 1600 in the 1978. The device was actually modified from a Betamax video recorder to a digital audio recorder. From the recording mastering, the digital recorders met recording studio. There first encounter with the consumer was in the late 1990s.

Digital audio shone through because it was so useful in the mass-production,  recording,

distribution of sound and manipulation. There could not be music distributed across the internet through on-line stores if there was not for digital compression algorithms and recording. The cost of audio distribution was greatly reduced once the physical objects were replaced with data files.