What is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)?

Originally in the 1980s, this was a term used to refer to a microprocessor based system designed to play back sampled and synthesized sounds as well as to record, edit and play back digital audio. With the advent of faster desktop computing, DAW terminology evolved to encompass a system consisting of software to handle multi-track audio and MIDI resident on a host computer with audio hardware interfaces.

The following pictures are examples of DAW setups: