Confidence Monitoring

Listening directly from a recording medium while recording to ensure the program material is being recorded correctly. Many analog recorders have a playback head trailing the record head, allowing you to hear the material directly after it has been recorded. Professional DAT recorders usually have four heads for confidence monitoring (it takes two to record and two more to play back at the same time), as do a number of the modular digital multitrack (MDM) recorders. Most DAW systems do not provide for confidence monitoring, but do allow you to monitor the signal just prior to being recorded to the hard drive. Confidence Monitoring is a distinction that was considered much more important in the analog days, or early digital days. Nowadays, with most digital systems, we can pretty much depend on getting the signal we hear recorded in tact.