Documenting key events in the history of vinyl record making from 1990 to 2015

[ectomorphs]

Dear Lathe trolls,
Some of you will know me because we’ve spoken via phone/email/zoom/face-to-face in the past – My name is Rene Wiedner, I’m an associate professor at Warwick University, and I’ve been doing research on how vinyl record manufacturing was kept alive by enthusiasts after the successful commercialization of digital media and before the recent ‘vinyl revival’. I have had the great pleasure of learning from many of you directly how you and others have contributed to preserving analog audio disc making.

Here is a plea from me: Can you think of any events that stand out for you (or others) as having played an important part in the history of vinyl record making between 1990 and 2015 – either because they jeopardized the continued existence of vinyl record making or played a key role in preventing its extinction? Some of these events may seem trivial at first but significant in retrospect. I’m thinking especially of developments concerning cutter head repair/development; lacquer disc production; development and distribution of new lathes (e.g. Vinyl Recorder; Vinylium Kingston Dubplate Cutter); running lathe cut workshops to educate newcomers, and the like.
I’d be interested in any stories or information you might have – along with specific dates, people and places, if at all possible, to develop a detailed historical account. Please feel free to post here so that everyone can see or comment – or message me directly if you prefer to share privately. I will of course credit you in any publications that emerge from this.
I’ve written one academic paper on vinyl record making in the digital age (with a focus on business ethics), which is finally due to be published in a few months and am working on at least one more academic paper, as well as on a book for a more general audience.
Also, I’m more than happy to chat or discuss anything in a one to one conversation. Please do get in touch.

Finally, also to note that Jesus Agnew will be giving a live tour of his workshop on September 16th at an online academic workshop that I’m organizing (https://craftresearch.org/events) . You can register for free at https://craftresearch.org/join and will receive a zoom link to the event about a week in advance.

Thanks everyone for sharing so liberally – I do think that documenting what you’ve done (and are doing) is very important and potentially inspiring for other communities.

Best wishes,
Rene

[Phinster]

Well, the Apollo factory in Banning CA 'burning down'...personally as a cutting engineer, the loss of Transco and Apollo lacquers wasn't one ! However they had
started to make excellent cutting styli based on the Micropoint design. They were fashioned from what seemed to be pure corundum and would last for hundreds
of hours unlike earlier days where you were lucky to get thirty hours. Corundum only surpassed by diamond in hardness meant they could be fashioned by diamond
abrasives...

This left the sole supplier of lacquer blanks to a Japanese company. We had been using them for years along with quite a few other studios..they were good..
As for the styli, they are now made by another Japanese company..Adamant who make diamond bearings and the like...they had been around for a long time too.
The shape was more like the original Neumann design...people tended to use Micropoints. I'm told they have tweaked this to be more like Micropoints, but I have never
used one..

To me the loss of the Transco/Micropoint was like a photographer finding out they no longer made his favourite brand of film!

[ectomorphs]

Thanks Phinster,
The developments concerning styli and lacquer discs are indeed very interesting! Can anyone confirm that MDC temporarily halted production following a tsunami and that their subsequently produced lacquers were of poor quality because they had trouble finding usable compounds to adhere to health and safety regulations?

[dubcutter89]

I think there has been quite some change in this quarter century period!

Unfortunately I was not there in the 90s, but from my understanding these were the wild west years.
Big companys closed their factories due to low or no demand and the people with love and understanding for this media had the chance to get truck loads full of dedicated equipment for basically scrap metal value...underground paradise!
Later the people in the business were struggling with the consequences - as the big companies were closing down also the suppliers of new or spare parts were closing down their departements...
But I'm sure some of the other engineers here can tell that story with more detail...

I guess the next "big" thing in the scene was the new upcoming home recorders/dubplate cutters around 2000 and the (not*) new technique of directly cutting into plastic instead of lacquer or copper. From my understanding this was driven by DJs and enthusiasts with big love for this media and not so much with a commercial aspect.
Easy and "cheap" new way to make one off records for DJs. And finally new equipment for record cutting!
(* actually this is nothing new at all as direct cut plastic disks were introduced somewhere in the 30s in germany with the Decelith brand blanks..)

Another thing that I think was/is very important was the takeoff of digital age that has pretty much changed everything! Mail, web, workflow..
For example the sharing of knowledge worldwide, connecting people in the industry or a forum like the SSOLT! Isn't that a big change(?!)
And of course also the new workflow. Sending music worldwide within seconds, mastering and preparing on the computer. Automatic cutting and easy QC.
Quite a difference to the old all analog way...

Also the digital age may have been one of the main drivers for the latest interest in phonograph records - technically speaking there is no need for vinyl records anymore since there is more convinient ways of listening or distributing music (CD, mp3, Streaming..) and even DJs now have the tools to spin/scratch music files similair to what was only possible with vinyl records on turntables 15(?) years back.
BUT - this accelerated music experience is not really satisfying for everybody and this may be one of the reasons why some people (+companies) are into phonograph records again.
It is a different way of experiencing music... At least I think that is also a reason...

This new demand for records then led to companies starting making new pressing equipment etc. around 2010-2015. But from my understanding there's a difference between the re-invented home recorders/dubplate cutters and the new pressing machines - the pressing side is mostly driven by commercial interest. Of course by people with love for the phonograph record, but not just for the love...

And then there's of course the outcome from all this - new businesses offering services: studios, pressing plants, parts suppliers etc..
It is possible again to buy everything from mastering to pressing with no need to search for vintage equipment (although not easy and not cheap).
And the (crazy?) market where everything "vinyl" is over the top. Equipment that was scrap 25 years ago now is worth big $$$ and records that were sold cheap are now sold for prices...well

The Apollo fire 2020 of course was a big bummer as it left the industry with just a single supplier for styli and another one for blanks. Monopol is never a good thing! (unless your the owner..)
But on the other hand this may have led to an increased demand for DMM technology and the introduction of new suppliers for technology and resources which probably would not have happened otherwise...
BTW - I don't share Phinsters experience with the late Transco styli. We have a bunch of styli made just before the fire (late 2019) which I happily leave unopened in their boxes because the ones I tried were not giving the results I was expecting at all... But that's a different story and part of this funny record cutting thing.
Sometimes you have a good day, sometimes not...The key is to have more good days than bad and enjoy what you're doing



I hope this little writeup is not totally off track (and I hope that nobody is offended by it!)
Just a few lines from a single person that of course cannot know it all...
Regards
Lukas

[ectomorphs]

Thanks Lukas!
Based on conversations I've had with others and research I've done, I agree with all your points - especially how digital communication has enabled the preservation of analog production. I think your point about DMM is especially interesting. It was introduced as a means of increasing efficiency and competing with the newly emerging CD (reducing surface noise and slightly increasing capacity) but is now a potential life saver for those still wanting to make records (apart from dubplates) as lacquer supplies have become increasingly precarious. Is this part of a sustained drive towards DMM or just temporary until new lacquer disc manufacturers manage to provide sufficient quantities of reliable products? We shall see! But in the meantime, I do want to properly document the developments you mentioned and give credit where it's due. I think most people underestimate just how difficult it is to keep a technology alive when commercial interests subside and an increasingly precarious supply chain has to be mended to prevent it from completely falling apart.

[Phinster]

Thanks Phinster,
The developments concerning styli and lacquer discs are indeed very interesting! Can anyone confirm that MDC temporarily halted production following a tsunami and that their subsequently produced lacquers were of poor quality because they had trouble finding usable compounds to adhere to health and safety regulations?

MDC used to take a break once a year or so for maintenance..all makers of lacquers occasionally produce less than ideal results..not sure if the weather had
an impact...it was hard to communicate directly with Japan..you had to go through their agents,which often gave vague replies..Tad from MDC used to visit
London studios with his daughter who spoke English..they were conducive to suggestions tho...

[ectomorphs]

Dear vinyl record aficionados,
Happy 2023!
I just wanted to reach out to you to let you know that I am trying to document certain developments in phonographic record making from the peak of global vinyl record sales (late 1970s) until December 2022. I don’t want to keep this information to myself but rather make it publicly available as a useful reference document for others.
Like many of you, I have tried to pull together information from various sources but have struggled to obtain verifiable details. Much of the information I have seen in forums appears to be based on estimates or guesses (which sometimes contradict each other) and the original source is not always made explicit. Compiling a list of details spanning several decades is also tricky due to decisions about scope: Try to include too much and you are left with a lot of patchy and potentially superfluous details; try to restrict the scope too much and you are left with a list that is of very little interest to more than a handful of people around the world.
I have therefore decided to establish a directory that focuses on a limited time period (1977-2022), a limited number of categories (manufacturers of (1) disc cutting lathes; (2) cutterheads; (3) disc cutting styli; (4) lacquer-coated master discs; (5) pressing machines; (6) pressing molds) and a limited number of items per category (name of manufacturer; first year of production, final year production). Of course, it would be useful to include further details, but these are the basics I believe that could be useful and serve as important inputs for subsequent documentation efforts. I have also decided that a cut-off date (December 2022) is necessary; if I try to capture all developments in real time, the resulting document will always be hopelessly out of date.
I have set up a shared document for this documentation purpose here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BynXKqGI2lwh31FrpFF9fWOxutEyVA4a/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113800609303172639738&rtpof=true&sd=true

My plea to you: If you are aware of any reliable sources of information pertaining to the above (i.e. anything about relevant manufacturers from 1977 onwards), could you please share these with me? Or, if you personally have relevant details based on your own experience, could you either enter them directly in the shareable document or send these to me via email (or via some other communication method) – and include the source? Naturally, I want all contributors to be credited unless they prefer not to be named.
And finally, just to note that one of my academic papers on vinyl record making (co-authored with Professor Robin Holt, Copenhagen Business School) has FINALLY been published, which you should be able to access here in case you are you interested in some philosophical bedtime reading:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quarterly/article/technology-maturity-and-craft-making-vinyl-records-in-the-digital-age/2DFA2C52D738817A623F8699AB300345

Please don’t forget to look at the online ‘supplementary materials’ for the article to see a few photos that contributors have shared.

Thanks for all your support to the phonographic record making community and to my research thereof – and please do feel free to get in touch in case you ever want to discuss anything!

Best wishes,
Rene

Dr Rene Wiedner
Associate Professor of Organization Theory
Warwick Business School | Room 3.141
University of Warwick | Coventry CV4 7AL
Personal profile: https://www.wbs.ac.uk/about/person/rene-wiedner
Check out the WBS Process and Practice Research Programme: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/research/ppi/

[ectomorphs]

Dear lathe trolls,
It was an honor to present some of my findings on the persistence of analog audio disc making as part of my research on preserving crafts at the “International Disk Recording and Mastering Convention” hosted by J.I. Agnew and Michael Dixon earlier this month.
One thing I’d like to ask all of you is whether anyone has any (more or less reliable) estimates of how many people around the world are currently making analog audio discs, ideally broken down by:
1. Cutting lacquer-coated discs for subsequent pressing
2. Cutting one-off or limited edition lacquer-coated discs (dubplates)
3. Embossing polycarbonate
4. PETG diamond cutting
5. Direct to Metal Mastering (DMM)
6. Any other technique/materials
Even ball park estimates would be useful to see whether my own estimates (which I won’t share yet so as not to influence anyone else’s estimates and also not to embarrass myself in case they are completely wrong!) are reasonable. The perhaps easiest estimate concerns DMM as there is only quite a small number of DMM lathes in operation and mastering studios + pressing plants generally publicize the fact that they have one (or several) of them. Also, Steven Berson has created a listing of DMM lathe owners on the Total Sonic website: https://www.totalsonic.net/dmm.htm (although I’m also aware that several Neumann VMS70 lathes (and possibly other models?) are being (or recently have been) converted for DMM given the shortage of lacquers following the Apollo fire.
Again, any estimates would be useful to understand the current state of analog audio disc making and put the different types of disc making into perspective. Even better would be estimates over time to understand how the different disc making techniques have developed over time (perhaps in 10 year intervals) over the past 40 years, but that kind of information might be very difficult to obtain…
Also, if I haven’t interviewed you yet and you’d like to share your personal story about how you got into making or supporting analog audio disc making for a book I’m writing (but probably won’t get published for another few years), please do get in touch. I’m trying to capture as many voices as possible.
Anyway, thank you so much in advance for any info you’re willing to share!
-Rene

[Dub Studio]

Looks like a great project!

I can't help thinking that rather than make it open-ended, it would maybe be better to ask specific questions, each one in a new thread and then people can pitch in with what they know.

For example, I just picked up a box of NOS Presto master lacquers. I don't know when they were made, but the condition seems good so I don't particularly care. It's only when I read your doc and I saw the section on lacquer-coated discs that I asked myself if they could possibly be from the late 1970s. I checked the box and was amazed to see there was a delivery date on a slip on the box... 05-02-1947!

The problem now is that I know Presto made lacquers in 1947, but someone else would have to answer the question as to when they stopped making them. I am pretty sure that will be the case for a lot of these questions.

[ectomorphs]

Yes, that's a good point. Asking too many questions at once is overwhelming, so breaking them down into very specific ones probably makes the most sense. But I also don't want to flood the forum with lots of questions in case it starts annoying people. I'm pretty sure Presto stopped making lacquers in the 1960s as home and mobile recording had pretty much switched completely to tape by then.

[ectomorphs]

I found this really interesting nugget of information - see file attached - in an old BPI report from 1986. It lists the pressing plants that were still active in the UK at the time and the ones that closed in the early 1980s.