Test pressing quality control

[klikli_ska]

Hi everybody!

How do you manage the test pressing quality control with your customers? (this is specially addressed to pressing plant customers' service department)

As our small pressing plant is growing more and more, we do more test pressings and we are facing the shitty turntables and awful customer quality control problem each day. It's a daily basis to talk with customers that are complaining about skips and jumps, saturation, high frequencies loss, etc. but when we ask for details on how they made the quality control, we always discover that they are not doing well: using different audio equipment for comparing analog and digital sound, incorrect settings on turntables or the holy grail of nowadays plague: the all-in-one shitty PVC turntables...

With our test pressing shipping, we always add a sheet with proper instructions for quality check and how to report an issue, but we know that no one is reading that piece of paper...

How do you manage all this issues? I know all of you pressing people could write a bible about how NOT to make a quality control on a test pressing with your expert wisdom, but today I am asking here for some help about how you do to avoid this huge waste of time.

Thanks a lot in advance and have a nice day!

Kike Pérez
Krakatoa Records

[Lupu]

Obvious, but: Are your clients mostly local? Invite them in to use your quality control room at the plant, with the added bonus of checking the possible issues together.

[klikli_ska]

Obvious, but: Are your clients mostly local? Invite them in to use your quality control room at the plant, with the added bonus of checking the possible issues together.

Hi Lupu!

Thanks for your reply.

No, they aren't. Our clients aren't mostly local, so it's impossible to invite them here to check it. In addition, we are a small plant with only a few workers with a lot of workload, so this could be even more workload in our daily basis. In some cases, we did it, but we cannot do it with all of our customers.

Thanks!

K.

[Lupu]

I am asking here for some help about how you do to avoid this huge waste of time.

Double your price of the test pressings and make them optional. Not recommended of course since you miss a important quality control step. But some plants do it. Needs a lot of confidence regarding your cutting, stampers and pressing operations but saves your valuable time for sure.

[Yasiek]

When the problem lies with the client's hardware and they won't accept that their turntable is, to put it mildly, low-quality, record the TP and send them the file. Ask them to check if the issues persist in the recording. If not, the customer has their answer. It’s been working well for us. It involves more work, but it saves so much hassle and avoids the back-and-forth of explaining why testing TPs on budget hardware 'posing' as a turntable is a mistake. We've seen plenty of claims following tests on Denver players, which actually scratched the vinyl on the first spin, damaging the bridges between grooves and causing skips on even high-end equipment."

[mossboss]

Hi All
There is and it has been an issue for many years, If you pressed them and they pass muster in your QC steps than it is the case that the client has some unknown to you/us issue which invariably leads them to blame the test pressing.
If your actual approval prior to posting them out are rigid than it is a case that you just tell them straight out that there is no issue, making suggestions such go play it somewhere else ask a friend etc etc etc is futile looking for things that do not even exist
The mind is already set that the test pressing is dud, no way you can do anything about it, their ears are blocked, charge them for whatever work you done so far, refund them the balance and done with them or you can do the job again and again and still have an unhappy customer who is going to be looking for any issue that justifies his initial rejection, 12,000 titles later we have learned that lesson
Suffice to say that you will get that with "internet experts" or ppl who's expectations are beyond the mediums capability or what it can deliver, nursing some totally misconstrued "Analogue" delivery of their music
Of course at the other end of the scale and in actual fact some of the punters out there will ask for 20-30 test pressings which they drip out in the market slowly demanding a much higher price than the production record
We accommodate them, charging a heavy premium above 5 units! Nine times out of ten they go along, so it is a case that it is part of our game, hard but that's the reality