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Commercial digital recording of classical and jazz music began in the early 1970s, pioneered by Japanese companies such as Denon, the BBC, and British record label Decca (who in the mid-70s developed digital audio recorders of their own design for mastering of their albums), although experimental recordings exist from the 1960s. The first 16-bit PCM recording in the United States was made by Thomas Stockham at the Santa Fe Opera in 1976 on a Soundstream recorder. In most cases there was no mixing stage involved; a stereo digital recording was made and used unaltered as the master tape for subsequent commercial release. These unmixed digital recordings are still described as DDD since the technology involved is purely digital. (Unmixed analogue recordings are likewise usually described as ADD to denote a single generation of analogue recording.)

Although the first-ever digital recording of a non-classical music piece, Morrissey-Mullen's cover of the Rose Royce hit Love Don't Live Here Anymore (released 1979 as a vinyl EP) was recorded in 1978 at EMI's Abbey Road recording studios, the first entirely digitally recorded (DDD) popular music album was Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop, recorded in late 1978. It was unmixed, being recorded straight to a two-track 3M digital recorder in the studio. Many other top recording artists were early adherents of digital recording. Others, such as former Beatles producer George Martin, felt that the multitrack digital recording technology of the early 1980s had not reached the sophistication of analogue systems. Martin used digital mixing,[citation needed] however, to reduce the distortion and noise that an analogue master tape would introduce (thus ADD). An early example of an analogue recording that was digitally mixed is Fleetwood Mac's 1979 release Tusk.

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