Mitsubishi played a major role in the development of professional digital recording during the 1980s, becoming one of the principal competitors to Sony’s DASH system. Its early X-80 two-track digital recorder was followed by the ProDigi family of professional reel-to-reel digital machines, including the X-800, X-850, X-86 and later X-880. Mitsubishi’s systems were adopted by major recording studios for multitrack recording and digital mastering, helping establish tape-based digital recording as a serious professional format before hard disk recording became dominant in the 1990s.
