410 Chapter 14
Tape is a linear medium and it is necessary to wait for the tape to wind to a desired part
of the recording. In contrast, the head of a hard disk drive can access any stored data in
milliseconds. This is known in computers as direct access and in audio production as
nonlinear access. As a result, the nonlinear editing workstation based on hard drives has
eclipsed the use of tape for editing.
Digital broadcasting uses coding techniques to eliminate the interference, fading, and
multipath reception problems of analog broadcasting. At the same time, more effi cient
use is made of available bandwidth. The hard drive-based consumer audio recorder gives
the consumer more power.
Figure 14.1 shows what the home audio system of the future may look like.
MPEG-compressed signals may arrive in real time by terrestrial or satellite broadcast, via
Figure 14.1 : Audio system of the future based on data technology.