Sonic Studio

Sonic Studio is an American company manufacturing digital audio production tools for engineering professionals. The company was created when Sonic Solutions divested itself of its audio product lines in order to concentrate on DVD and multimedia–oriented products.

Under the auspices of Sonic Solutions, the Sonic Studio audio workstation has driven the professional production and delivery of commercial Compact Discs. The original “Sonic System” pioneered the desktop delivery of Red Book masters on recordable CD, in the same way that the original Macintosh and LaserWriter spawned the desktop publishing revolution. Prior to the introduction of the Sonic System, Compact Disc were assembled and premastered using bulky, expensive and unreliable U-matic videotape–based systems.

The Sonic System began life as research into real–time, computer–based audio production. The Audio Signal Processor (or ASP) hardware–based audio signal processor, designed by James A. Moorer, after work on the Hydra audio project at Stanford University’s CCRMA, was a proof of concept for what is now considered a digital audio workstation. The ASP's design started life in 1980 and was designed primarily for real–time, multichannel EQ and mixing. SoundDroid, an in–house project of Lucasfilm Ltd.’s Sprocket Systems that was later spun off as part of The Droid Works, was a hard disk–based, non–linear, second generation digital audio workstation that leveraged the research done on the ASP. Though the SoundDroid project was never commercialized and The Droid Works was later sold to Avid, the audio development team went on to first create the NoNOISE restoration system in 1987, hosted on a Motorola–powered SUN 1, the first true, general purpose computer “workstation,” which had been developed in cooperation with Lucasfilm. The SUN ran UNIX, developed by Bell Labs and refined at UC Berkeley. Sonic Studio’s current flagship product run on Mac OS, a modern version of that same UNIX variant, BSD Unix, that powered the original SUN workstation.

...
Wikipedia