Digital audio began in the telephone industry, where it was used to digitize telephone conversations to, in effect, compress them so that multiple conversations could be transmitted at the same time on existing wires. They found that by digitizing sound, they could “process” it to eliminate unnecessary information – an analogy would be a system that saved paper by printing a book with all the white space between the letters removed. One piece of equipment digitally removed the audio “white spaces,” the compressed message was carried down the telephone lines, and a second piece of equipment reconstructed the message in a “readable” (or audible, in this case) form. That’s an oversimplification, but the point is that telephone companies pioneered techniques for digitizing audio, with the goal of reducing the load on their networks. Only later did these companies, and others, experiment with making high quality digital recordings for the music industry.

Some of earliest experiments with digital recording of high quality audio were those undertaken in Japan in the 1960s. Following the introduction of Betamax VCRs, which used a technology for video similar to what was needed to make digital audio recordings, Sony briefly offered an audio-only Betamax recorder, capable of recording audio digitally. This pioneering effort was largely forgotten by the time digital audio tape was reintroduced in the 1980s.