Looking for a record cutter for lacquer mastering

[replambe]

Oh, I'm sorry! €5,000! That changes.... absolutely nothing.

If you can get a machine from Souri for $3,000 you should jump all over it. But Based on your exchanges on this thread, I put the over/under on Souri ghosting you at about 2 emails back and forth.

So in other words, never attempt something you're not an expert at already. Got it.

[replambe]

It's amazing the lengths people will go to being unhelpful.

[ilium]

That's not what he is saying.. much of the info you seek is scattered about in the forums but without giving any parameters such as your level of experience or budget you asked a broad question to be answered of "mastering lacquers" and for the professionals and many others the setup you are asking to buy would easily be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

"Ok so I understand that Souri's deal is out of the question."
It's only out of the question if you are not willing to travel to germany for training or you second guess him. So add the cost of travel onto the 3k euros and try not to make remarks about how much houses cost or how you can cut corners to him or he'll stop talking to you.

"However if I use his prices as some sort of benchmark, the platter on his site is 310 euros. What kind of turntable would I need? Would the price really be multiple thousands?"
310 euros is not for a complete turntable. You need a high torque turntable which off hand will probably cost $300-500.. or alot more... you might luck out and find one for cheap .. search the forum for models.

"I may forego the feedback cutter head for now since it's not immediately necessary, since I would just be experimenting at first anyway. Digital/analog converters... I have a good reel to reel and a decent stereo amp... I'm guessing these are not enough? (this is something I'm guessing I don't know about)."

For professional mastering? no probably not.

FYI I'm under the impression Souri does not sell the feedback system to first time buyers.

And if I can DIY this, could you link me? Thanks.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=DIY+site%3Alathetrolls.com

It's amazing the lengths people will go to being unhelpful.

Teach a man to fish y'know?

[replambe]

"Ok so I understand that Souri's deal is out of the question."
It's only out of the question if you are not willing to travel to germany for training or second guess him. So add the cost of travel onto the 3k euros

I just checked google flights. It's less than a grand to travel from Boston to Stuttgart.

310 euros is not for a complete turntable.

This I knew, and didn't imply otherwise.

You need a high torque turntable which off hand will probably cost $300-500.. or alot more... you might luck out and find one for cheap .. search the forum for models.

Ok that brings the total up to $4700.

For professional mastering? no probably not

All right. This I could procure over time, I'm pretty sure? I don't expect in any way to start out professional...

[replambe]

Teach a man to fish y'know?

It only teaches me that they put a lot of effort into not being helpful. Searching the entire website for three letters...? And telling me to do so using some fancy website process? Seems like someone really taking the time to not take the time. Almost humorous. Shall I also search for the word "the"?

[ilium]

Teach a man to fish y'know?

All it really teaches me is that either they don't know or they can't be bothered. I'm already well aware of how to search, but suggesting I employ the query "DIY" is more or less like telling me to search the word "the".

The real answer is that there is no step by step set of instructions to build a lathe capable of mastering lacquers or otherwise but as mentioned by audiosteam and even myself in my first reply a number of threads by people who successfully built nice systems.

[Gridlock]

Only ONE copy was made before the label decided to scrap the vinyl release and instead of extra bonus songs, there are 4 songs that AREN'T on it! Talk about super duper rare! I hope someone else on here is as amoral as me....

Are those the hidden tracks? You rambling on about the mole people would be worth every penny. Count me in for 4.

Dm me your mailing addresses, people. Gridlock4days@gmail.com 2 sides keep it to 3:30 a side. I'll send you a lathe cut and some promo gear. Include a few dollars IF you feel like it. Drac and the swamp rats were stoked to have a special run of 13 7"s cut during an ayahuasca ceremony as part of an order of 40. 40 is the most records I will do for you and that is 100 bucks. I will only cut copywritten material. Ask about my hot deals on metallica 45s! But if your an unsigned artist you can write the letter C draw a circle around it BOOM! ready to go! But really if you want a record of me ranting I will do that.

[replambe]

Only ONE copy was made before the label decided to scrap the vinyl release and instead of extra bonus songs, there are 4 songs that AREN'T on it! Talk about super duper rare! I hope someone else on here is as amoral as me....

Are those the hidden tracks? You rambling on about the mole people would be worth every penny. Count me in for 4.

Dm me your mailing addresses, people. Gridlock4days@gmail.com 2 sides keep it to 3:30 a side. I'll send you a lathe cut and some promo gear. Include a few dollars IF you feel like it. Drac and the swamp rats were stoked to have a special run of 13 7"s cut during an ayahuasca ceremony as part of an order of 40. 40 is the most records I will do for you and that is 100 bucks. I will only cut copywritten material. Ask about my hot deals on metallica 45s! But if your an unsigned artist you can write the letter C draw a circle around it BOOM! ready to go! But really if you want a record of me ranting I will do that.

Amazing the vitriol reserved for those who dare knock on the club house door.

[ilium]

Btw the price I sell the one I have is not only the system... but the guy is dreaming...

Hey, It's unclear to me what is included with the ZEZ... the Preamp but not the mechanics and leadscrew etc right?

[Gridlock]

It's not vitriol dude I'm being 100% real I'm just an absolute madman who's been electrocuted too many times! For really real. Cutting records is like Way intense you gotta be a wizard or something. I mean dude, just dream and build and test and dream and work and sleep and eat and build and whatever maybe you'll get lucky and pick up a machine for cheap after years of digging and cloning and sleeping and building and dreaming and dude hey. That's when you hope we're still here to help when you don't know what to do with your new machine

[rsimms3]

I think there are some good points brought up in the thread but have gotten a bit skewed.

You can cut "master lacquers" on any machine that will make a groove into a lacquer disc. I think you should probably establish some parameters and give some detail about your desired outcome.

1. Why do you want to cut discs? Hobby? Profession? Small business? This will really drive what approach you take to buying a machine.

2. What material do you want to cut? Is it lacquer mastering discs as you mention or do you have interest in PVC or poly carbonate? This will also influence what type of machine you buy and the type of disc creation you intend to be involved in.

3. How much money do you have to spend? It's a legitimate question. Master lacquer discs are expensive, I think last number I saw was $20+ per disc and you have to buy 25 discs at a time from Apollo. Not to mention needles and the expense of learning how to cut because many of your learning attempts will not be good.

4. The lathe is only one piece of the cutting chain, how much do you have to spend on the signal chain? What type of processing do you want to do? You can go from a Walkman to an amp into a iron magnet mono head really easy but if your goal is higher quality, you'll need more expensive equipment in the signal chain.

5. Stereo or mono? The only one that might be selling stand alone stereo heads is Flo and if not in stock you'll have to go secondary market - eBay, scrounge, etc if you buy a lathe that doesn't include a stereo cutting head. Mono heads are "plentiful" and Todd at DeepGrooves is actively repairing most any mono head out there.

There are no sellers today that you can buy a new complete system and have it shipped to your doorstep tomorrow. Souri might sell you one if things go your way. I don't think the ZEZ system is in a state of active sales, and Silltoe is not in production yet. And last I saw posted Flo was only building his Neumann systems 1-2 a year (I think that was the number) so even if you could get on some sort of waiting list, it would be a long time. Not sure how sales of his stereo head are facilitated. If anything here is inaccurate, feel free to jump in and correct me.

At least that's what I know from reading the forum fairly regularly.

[petermontg]

Buy yourself a 6N, fall in love with cutting.
Don't limit yourself to another's esoteric way of thinking.
You are going to have enough headaches to deal with ....

The only limit you will have is the one you put in place for yourself.

Vitriol...... as you get to know most of us you will get the sense of humor most of us have.

I think this thread has been more than helpful for you with some great advice from people who started from nothing.

As for mastering lacquers out of the gate...... Whole different story.

Best
Peter

[piaptk]

Ok, I'm going to give you a 100% sincere and serious reason why your responses drifted off into joke territory.

You can choose to read it and absorb it and understand it, and use the information to adjust your posting behavior to get more helpful responses going forward, or you can do what you've done in the past on this thread and get defensive and huffy and act like the victim, in which case, it's going to be hard for anyone to actually care to invest the typing time to help you.

1) First thing to know is that Gridlock is just a freak, and nothing he posts is serious. But he's funny if you can follow what he's talking about.
2) You got off on the really wrong foot by taking Ilium's sincere (and reasonable) recommendation and freaking out with the whole "$15,000! I could buy a house with that!". The fact that you came in looking for (aggressively expecting) a "lacquer mastering setup" for less than 5000 EUROS, which everybody in the hobby knows will cost you upwards of $50,000 to even start to compete with the pro guys who are mastering records for pressing plants (amongst many other things in your posts) means you haven't bothered doing any research at all on your own. You want people who have the knowledge to spend a bunch of time retyping and/or searching and linking for you things that have already been written here over and over again and are accessible via the search button. We all have our own projects that we would prefer to spend time on.
3) Then, you started getting hung up arguing details rather than accepting the genuine advice of people who know whats going on. i.e. "I live in the poor part of the state where I can buy a house for $15,000" (please send us some $15,000 listings of move-in ready houses so we can all move there and be your neighbor), "$3,000 for a trip to Germany? I can fly from Boston for $1,000", I didn't say $5,000, I said 5000 euros, that's SIX thousand dollars", etc. "So in other words, never attempt something you're not an expert at already. Got it." which was so far removed from the statement it was replying to it's hard for me to even understand what you are talking about. We are trying to show you the forest and you are banging your head into a tree.

Yes, this is a club house. Many of us have been here for a decade or more, and some of us know a LOT about this hobby. And most (not all) of us are very welcoming to newbies who come in and nicely ask for help after doing their own research. But there are a TON of threads here that lay out the difference between professional stereo mastering setups and mono-semi-pro plastic dub machines and their costs. If you haven't done enough research to figure that out, then you have to be pleasant enough to humbly take advice, if it doesn't fit your budget, then be kind and thank them nicely. If you act entitled and defensive to genuine advice, you won't get any more of it.

Unless you can actually buy a lathe from Souri, remove him from your thought process, because he has no bearing on reality. He's like this mythical creature that doesn't actually exist in terms of a readily available lathe that anybody can buy.

Souri is most likely not going to sell you a lathe, whether you fly to Germany or not. If you can't manage to be nice enough to get good responses from THESE guys, there is no way you are going to be able to prostrate yourself in front of Souri and kiss the ring enough to get him to sell one to you. He sells them to 1 out of every 100 people that try to buy them. So, if you can get him to sell you one, YOU SHOULD BUY IT. It's super cheap for what it is compared to the market outside of Souri. But if you CAN'T buy one from him, then you can't expect the rest of the market to meet his price point. Souri doesn't need the money, and he doesn't want to make very many, that's why he never sells them. He wants people to clamor after what he has and then be able to deny them. He spends thousands of dollars on trade shows (NAMM, AES, SXSW), goes and sets up a booth to show it off, and then eventually ghosts the potential customers on email for one reason or the other. It's a game for him.

This is an extremely expensive and time consuming hobby with a steep learning curve. Once you buy the machine, you are going to spend many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours practicing and dialing it in until you get the results you are after. The idea that you can decide to take up driveway basketball and then immediately jump up to the NBA, is one that most people here find kind of funny, because they've been schooling the neighborhood kids for years at the local park court, and they know how much money, time, and trial and effort they've invested.

[Gridlock]

Yeah Mike sorry for pretending to be Joanna all these years. I'll tone it down a bit

[piaptk]

Yeah Mike sorry for pretending to be Joanna all these years. I'll tone it down a bit

I think you are hilarious. But you are a freak. And I would imagine you would take that as a compliment, or I wouldn't have said it.

[petermontg]

Yeah Mike sorry for pretending to be Joanna all these years. I'll tone it down a bit

Hahahaha, just when you thought it was safe .......

[ilium]

Amazing the vitriol reserved for those who dare knock on the club house door.

Try being a submitter at Discogs who hasn't read the guidelines.

[jesusfwrl]

Replambe, I will make you an offer which may help you finance your lacquer mastering system:

I will pay you EUR 15 000 to build me a house!
It must be at least 600 m2 over 2 stories, soundproof, well-insulated, double glazed windows, good acoustics within, timber framed, solid hardwood walls and floors, fully fitted.
I will supply the land and EUR 15 000 will be yours as soon as you're done.

I understand you may not be an expert carpenter, but I'm not in a hurry, take your time and learn as you go. You will of course have to pay for materials and tools, and you'd have to re-do things until you get it right, but hey, you'd be getting EUR 15 000 in the end!

When you 're done I can hook you up to a few of my friends, who would also happily pay you EUR 15 000 to build them a house. Eventually, you'll be able to afford the best lathe ever. Or not, but at least you will understand first hand why nobody is going to build a complete lacquer mastering system for you under EUR 5000.

I will happily supply complete disk mastering systems, for a reasonable price. But EUR 5000 will only get you a couple of parts, not a complete system.

If you ask Flo for a compete AM44 setup for cutting lacquer masters, for under EUR 5000, he'd stop talking to you faster than you can say "Souri". Rightfully so.

[athoa2487]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/152986607149?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1558.l2649

[athoa2487]

Japan Record Cutting Machine, cutting lathe 12inch LP
http://www.ebay.com/itm/152986607149?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1558.l2649