How vinyl phonograph records are made

[davideduardo]

I found this on a tech site... an interesting and well illustrated story of how records... those round plastic things... are made.

How Are Vinyl Records Made?

We know vinyl records sound great, but do you actually know how they're made?

www.reviewgeek.com

 

[oldies76]

BEST and pure way to listen to music, hands down! If you can get some original and clean sounding 45's from the 1950's onward like I have, they will sound sweet on your turntable. Styrene can be a problem, but if you can get a good copy that's not worn, it'll sound great and in its original mono sound, if you like originality. The stereo ones from the 70's and 80's really sound full if they are in newer looking condition.

 

[kfbkfb]

Pspatial Audio has compiled a lot of info about records:

Stereo Lab - Stylus Care

Stylus care phonograph stylus cleaning advice experiments

www.pspatialaudio.com

Phono stylus wear and lifetime

Stereo Lab Phono stylus wear and lifetime

www.pspatialaudio.com

Care of records

Stereo Lab care of records cleaning of records cleaning of LPs

pspatialaudio.com

Record wear

Stereo Lab XXXXXXX

pspatialaudio.com

Stereo Lab - CD-4 record wear and care

CD-4 records wear and tear wear of CD-4 records do CD-4 records have the subcarrier erased

pspatialaudio.com

Stereo Lab - 45 RPM records

Stereo Lab 45 RPM records

pspatialaudio.com

(footnote 6 has useful info about playing some 45s)


If possible, a true Shibata stylus should be used for playing all records since the stylus shape will bridge the damaged lower half of the groove and contact the undamaged (upper half) of the groove.


Kirk Bayne

 

[Don CT]

I was watching this last night.

 

[kfbkfb]

I bought a new vinyl record in 2011 and then bought another 2 in 2021/22 - one is a direct cut QS quadraphonic matrix encoded special edition EP and the other also involves Quad - it is the downmix (to stereo) of the Quad mix of the Jackson 5 Greatest Hits LP.

I'm still using my Shure V-15 Type III phono cartridge, purchased new in 1976-08, a new true Shibata stylus for it is ~$188, I also need a new turntable, perhaps an Audio Technica LP-120.


Kirk Bayne

 

[Theater of My Mind]

I found this on a tech site... an interesting and well illustrated story of how records... those round plastic things... are made.

Thanks for posting this.

Step One of that article is the part that makes vinyl records sound so much better than digital. It's not just that the whole audio chain is analog even though that's the part that's romanticized, it's really all about the mastering. Truthfully, CDs should be able to sound as good, if not better than vinyl, but unfortunately the loudness wars came to CD mastering early on and now everything is brickwall limited. If you look at the waveform of a CD or digitally distributed file it looks like a square wave which is not musical at all. You can't cut that kind of slammed waveform onto vinyl, though, because the needle wouldn't be able to track it properly. So, vinyl gets its own mastering process which is not brickwalled and it actually retains more of the original dynamics. As a result, the vinyl record ironically sounds better than the digital version, even if the original music was digitally recorded.

Step Two is why it takes so long for the vinyl version of your favorite album to go on sale after its initial release date -- Creating the lacquer master. Well, there were only two factories in the world that made the lacquer discs. One was Apollo Masters in Banning, California which was destroyed by fire two years ago. The other is a small shop in Japan that was in no way equipped to handle the demand from Apollo. From what I understand some alternatives have popped up in the meantime but there's still a big supply chain crunch with this step.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Masters_Corporation_fire