Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) Evolution

Dr. Robert Moog was the pioneer of the analog synthesizer. His visionary work is recognized by all who participated at the leading edge of music synthesis. However, these devices had to be adjusted hourly to keep them in tune. Creating a composition with them was tedious at best. Hal Chamberlin and David Cox, founders of Micro Technology Unlimited (MTU), quickly realized this problem disappeared with digital synthesis, and started to develop products using digital synthesis and audio editing. The roots for the DAW started from the commercial needs for precise control of audio on computers; government funded speech research, commercial telephone research, and University computer music synthesis centers. Only the music centers needed 16-bit quality A/D-D/A converters running at CD quality sample rates. The first Professional DAWs were mini and mainframe computers with audio A/D-D/A converters added for audio input/output. The status "father of Digital Audio" is granted to Max Matthews who was at AT&T doing speech research for Telephony.