The Best Musical Hosts

A recording studio is a specialized facility for sound recording, mixing, and audio production of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds.

Design and equipment

They range in size from a small in-home project studio large enough to record a single singer-guitarist, to a large building with space for a full orchestra of 100 or more musicians. Ideally both the recording and monitoring (listening and mixing) spaces are specially designed by an acoustician or audio engineer to achieve optimum acoustic properties.

Digital audio workstations

In the 2010s, software applications are more reliant on the quality of the audio recording hardware than the computer they are running on, therefore typical high-end computer hardware is less of a priority unless MIDI is involved. While Apple Macintosh is used for most studio work, there is a breadth of software available for Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Multi-track recording

With the introduction of multi-track recording, it became possible to record instruments and singers separately and at different times on different tracks on tape, although it was not until the 1970s that the large recording companies began to adopt this practice widely, and throughout the 1960s many "pop" classics were still recorded live in a single take.

Radio studios

Radio studios are very similar to recording studios, particularly in the case of production studios which are not normally used on-air, such as studios where interviews are taped for later broadcast. This type of studio would normally have all of the same equipment that any other audio recording studio would have, particularly if it is at a large station, or at a combined facility that houses a station group, but is also designed for groups of people to work collaboratively in a live-to-air situation.

Broadcast studios also use many of the same principles such as sound isolation, with adaptations suited to the live on-air nature of their use. Such equipment would commonly include a telephone hybrid for putting telephone calls on the air, a POTS codec for receiving remote broadcasts, a dead air alarm for detecting unexpected silence, and a broadcast delay for dropping anything from coughs to profanity.