Professional audio in the context of "Recording studio"

A recording studio is a specialized facility for recording and mixing of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. 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 (acoustic isolation or diffusion or absorption of reflected sound reverberation that could otherwise interfere with the sound heard by the listener).

Recording studios may be used to record singers, instrumental musicians (e.g., electric guitar, piano, saxophone, or ensembles such as orchestras), voice-over artists for advertisements or dialogue replacement in film, television, or animation, Foley, or to record their accompanying musical soundtracks. The typical recording studio consists of a room called the "studio" or "live room" equipped with microphones and mic stands, where instrumentalists and vocalists perform; and the "control room", where audio engineers, sometimes with record producers, as well, operate professional audio mixing consoles, effects units, or computers with specialized software suites to mix, manipulate (e.g., by adjusting the equalization and adding effects) and route the sound for analog or digital recording. The engineers and producers listen to the live music and the recorded "tracks" on high-quality monitor speakers or headphones.

A concert, often known informally as a gig or show, is a live performance of music in front of an audience. The performance may be carried by a single musician, in which case it is sometimes called a recital, or by a musical ensemble such as an orchestra, choir, or band. Concerts are held in a wide variety of settings and sizes, spanning from venues such as private houses and small nightclubs to mid-sized concert halls and finally to large arenas and stadiums, as well as outdoor venues such as amphitheatres and parks. Indoor concerts held in the largest venues are sometimes called arena concerts or amphitheatre concerts.

Regardless of the venue, musicians usually perform on a stage (if not an actual stage, then an area of the floor designated as such). Concerts often require live event support with professional audio equipment. Before recorded music, concerts provided the main opportunity to hear musicians play. For large concerts or concert tours, the challenging logistics of arranging the musicians, venue, equipment, audience, and tickets are handled by professional tour promoters.

Home recording is the practice of recording sound in a private home instead of a professional recording studio. A studio set up for home recording is called a home studio or project studio. Home recording is widely practiced by voice actors, narrators, singers, musicians, podcast hosts, and documentary makers at all levels of success. The cost of professional audio equipment has dropped steadily as technology advances during the 21st century, while information about recording techniques has become easily available online. These trends have resulted in an increase in the popularity of home recording and a shift in the recording industry toward recording in the home studio.

In 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in a dramatic global increase in the number of remote workers in 2020, as well as home-based recording artists, which also led to the proliferation of internet-based microgenres like bedroom pop and egg punk.

In telecommunications and professional audio, a balanced line or balanced signal pair is an electrical circuit consisting of two conductors of the same type, both of which have equal impedances along their lengths, to ground, and to other circuits. The primary advantage of the balanced line format is good rejection of common-mode noise and interference when fed to a differential device such as a transformer or differential amplifier.

As prevalent in sound recording and reproduction, balanced lines are referred to as balanced audio.

Pink noise, 1⁄f noise, fractional noise or fractal noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density (power per frequency interval) is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. In pink noise, each octave interval (halving or doubling in frequency) carries an equal amount of noise energy.

Pink noise sounds like a waterfall. It is often used to tune loudspeaker systems in professional audio. Pink noise is one of the most commonly observed signals in biological systems.

A CDJ is a specialized digital music player for DJing. Originally designed to play music from compact discs, many CDJs can play digital music files stored on USB flash drives or SD cards. In typical use, at least two CDJs are plugged into a DJ mixer. CDJs have jog wheels and pitch faders that allow manipulation of the digital music similar to a vinyl record on a DJ turntable. Many have additional features that are not present on turntables, such as looping, beat analysis, and adjusting tempo independently of pitch. Additionally, some can function as DJ controllers to control the playback of digital files in DJ software such as VirtualDJ and Serato.

Many pro audio companies such as Gemini, Denon DJ, Numark, Stanton, and Vestax produced DJ quality CD players. In 1993 Denon DJ was the first to implement a 2-piece rack-mounted dual-deck variable-pitch CD player with a jog wheel and instant cue button for DJs. It quickly became the industry standard and was widely adopted in most clubs and mobile DJs throughout the 90s up until 2004 when Pioneer made an impact with the CDJ-1000. Pioneer DJ CDJs have since become widely regarded as the industry standard.