(By Rachel Lerman, Photos - K. Dearman, Washington Post, 20 Apr 2024)
Last week, The Washington Post visited Nashville’s United
Record Pressing, which made the first Beatles single in the United States in
1963, to witness the 2024 vinyl-making process and watch a Tyler, the Creator
record get pressed. Follow along and
find out how records are made — from lacquer to label.
Making the ‘DNA’
First, the artist records their album. Then a relay race
begins. A sound engineer masters the digital files, sending a high-quality
version of the tracks to the cutting engineer.
A lacquer, a soft material similar to nail polish, is attached to an
aluminum plate.
At United Record Pressing’s facility, a stylus with a
sapphire or ruby point vibrates with the sound of the music, and cuts the sound
waves onto the lacquer, creating the grooves that allow you to hear music. “The cut is almost like DNA,” said Matt
Lindsey, United Record Pressing’s chief technology officer. “It’s specific and
unique to that music content only.”
A plating technician then drills the lacquer to create a
hole in the middle, and scores the edges so an electrical current can carry
through the material.
Silver ‘spray paint’
Long before the vinyl record is made, the lacquer has to be
carefully cleaned and rinsed before it is “silvered” — sprayed with a liquid
silver solution. The liquid silver makes the lacquer disc electrically
conductive, so it can be copied.
“It’s like a spray paint booth,” Lindsey said. The tool used for
silvering is basically the same thing as a spray paint head, he said.
The disc is mounted to be put into a nickel plating bath
where it will be copied. This disc is
still not a record we buy — but it’s getting closer.
Peeling off the copies
Next come large chemical baths with electricity running
through them, where the silvered lacquer disc is submerged. “Its like a cooking a really slow temperature
meat,” said Dustin Blocker, chief creative officer of vinyl manufacturing
company Hand Drawn Records, in Dallas. Dissolved pellets of nickel in the bath
are attracted to the silvered disc and conform to the shape and grooves of the
lacquer.
About 12 hours later, the nickel creates a mirror image copy
of the lacquer disc. “The longer you can roast it, the better that copy is
going to be,” said Blocker, who is also president of the Vinyl Records
Manufacturing Association.
That mirror image copy is peeled from the lacquer disc — and
copied again.
This critical process eventually creates metal
copies called “stampers,” used on the pressing machine to create an actual
vinyl record that can be sold. “We try
to make that stamper as closely resembling the grooves of that lacquer as
possible,” Lindsey said.
But first, the stampers must be prepared so they will fit in
the pressing machine. Their centers are
punched out, and edges are formed using a machine.
A final stamper looks like a metal-plate, mirror-image
version of a vinyl record. Its ridges will create the record’s grooves, which
ultimately allow music to play.
A ‘giant waffle maker’ for records
At last, it’s finally time to press the record —
the complex process is nearing an end. The
actual material you feel on a vinyl record is PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, which
often comes in the form of small pellets.
The PVC is fed into a part of the record pressing machine where it is
melted at 250 degrees into a hockey-puck-like shape.
The puck, with a consistency like taffy, gets sent to the
hydraulic press. There, the machine squishes the two stampers — for the A side
and B side of a record — applying heat with high pressure steam and forcing the
puck to conform to their shape.
Think of it as a “giant waffle maker,” said Jenn D’Eugenio,
president and founder of Austin-based Women in Vinyl. This part only takes
about 20 to 30 seconds, she said. A
quick 10-second water cooling in the press forces the record to hold its shape. The imprinted vinyl record is next trimmed,
cooled and packaged for music lovers.
United Record Pressing has different machines to make
various sizes of records, including a 7-inch machine, for pressing an Elvis
record, and a 12-inch machine, shown pressing a 2017 Tyler, the Creator record,
“Flower Boy.” Colored PVC is used to make records in vibrant colors, a trend
that has gotten more popular as artists experiment with different versions of their
albums.
The cost of making one record varies in the industry
depending on the size of the manufacturer and the packaging, but could be
between $6 and $9, Blocker said.
As demand surges, some record pressing plants, like United
Record Pressing, have significantly expanded their operations. The company,
which is marking its 75th anniversary this year, expanded its plant starting in
2016, moving from a 25,000-square-foot plant to a 155,000-square-foot facility.
It now has 66 pressing machines, triple the number of presses than
when CEO Mark Michaels bought the company in 2007, and has the
capacity to press up to 80,000 records per day.
Seventeen years ago, Michaels thought he was buying a
business that would stay fairly niche. “I
didn’t think it would die, but I didn’t think it would go crazy with growth,”
he said. “Its gone from kind of a forgotten industry to something that drew
more intention, more investment and has become increasingly sophisticated.”
