A Guide to Digital Audio and Digital Audio Recorders

Digital audio recorders and digital recording technologywhole world of digital audio recorders far more
is a relatively new product on the emerging technologyaccessible to smaller companies wanting to monitor
markets in the 21st century, this is mainly due to thephone calls and conversations, as well as government
fact that previous audio recorders of earlier yearsdepartments wanting to be independent and hold their
were severely constrained by the size, or rather a lackown records.
of available drive space per hard disk, thus renderingDigital recording can be either purpose built hardware
them as only usable within huge rack arrays of largemodels or made by some simple customization of a
companies located in monitored server rooms muchbasic desktop PC, PCMCIA cards are commonly
like we remember them in science fiction films fromavailable on the market now to convert up to 4
the 1960s.channels of analogue audio per card into a digital
Towards the latter half of the last decade, drive spaceformat which is easily archived and stored either
on physical drives has increased exponentially, nowon-site or remotely via web uplink or FTP protocol.
giving us terabytes of space in computers or rackInternal security policies can be easily adhered to when
mounted digital audio recorders, also softwaremoving audio from digital audio recorders, either by
compression has come along in leaps and boundsmoving the data physically or by secure Ports or VPN
complimenting the increase in available space equally.protocol to a remote site.
We now find the latest state of the art digital audioDigital audio recording and the technology surrounding
recorders can come in just '1U' 19" that are capable orthem has exponentially increased, along with
recording basic speech at variable bit and samplecompression formats of formats such as MP3 and is
rates for up to 20 years continuously. This makes thewidely available and accessible to most companies.