When I first got into home recording in the pre-MIDI dawn of history, I had a small 8-channel desk, a Tascam 4-track open-reel machine and a motley collection of mics and effects, including a Great British Spring reverb and a tape-delay echo unit. Sophisticated it wasn't, but the setup was compact, easy to use, and it got results. Indeed, I learnt most of what I know today by struggling against the limitations of that small system. Of course I secretly dreamed of a mixing console long enough to cross time zones, towering effects racks with twinkling LEDs from floor to ceiling and monitors that the Terminator would have had to ask his brother to help lift. And when MIDI came on the scene, I wanted all that goes with that, too, including a sky-high rack of modules and samplers, a MIDI guitar and more MIDI output ports than a sieve's got holes.

After many years of saving and upgrading, that's more or less what I've ended up with, but am I satisfied? No, of course I'm not. But it isn't that I still dream of more and more gear — my dreams have adopted a far more pragmatic bent of late, and what I would really like is a very compact, very high quality setup that I can actually manage and that will fit in the one room I have available for my musical pursuits. Now the two metres of mixing console simply represent a physical barrier between me and where I'd like to install my new tower block ATC monitors, the equipment rack is like some monstrous hydra eternally spewing cables, and my MIDI system has got so complicated that it's likely to develop spontaneous intelligence at any time. So, what hope does the future hold?

It doesn't take a genius to see that the workstation approach, already applied to synthesizers and sequencers, will eventually make big inroads into the smaller studio. Computer-based tapeless recording systems such as Digidesign's Session 8 are just the beginning, and as soon as re-recordable optical media drops to consumer prices, there's no reason not to include multitrack recording, MIDI, mixing, processing and editing in one compact system, probably based around an inexpensive host computer and operated from a dedicated hardware interface. We're already seeing synthesizers and effects starting to appear on plug-in computer cards, and however much you love the pose value of a big studio, the advantages offered by a truly integrated system are enormous. For me, one of the greatest benefits afforded by such a system would be the ability to dispense with much of the cabling and patching of a conventional studio. If everything is in one unit, the risk of noise and ground loop hum is much reduced, and the overall sound quality stands to benefit significantly. After all, if you look at a typical signal in today's studio and see how many plugs, sockets, switches, cables, electronic components and internal connectors it passes through between its generation and its final journey to 2-track master, you'd be amazed that it's even recognisable, let alone half-way decent.

At the moment, there's a lot of talk about integrated, computer-based systems, and the so-called 'digital' versions of all the major sequencing packages indicate that this is seen as the way forward. Further down the line, the approach taken by Fostex with their Foundation 2000 project (see our report starting on page 68 of this issue) indicates that dedicated audio computers may be the way to go for more serious systems. Today, most of us still work in the established way with a hardware mixer, a hardware tape recorder, a rack of effects and a separate MIDI system, but I don't think the day is too far away when all that will seem very archaic and unbelievably cumbersome.