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Inside One Of the Last Vinyl Record Manufacturers
jonerik writes "The Nashville Tennessean has this look at Nashville's United Record Pressing, one of the last vinyl record manufacturers left in the U.S. Although LPs and 12" and 7" singles make up a tiny portion of the American music market at this point, the article reports that United's business is booming, thanks to consolidation within Nashville's record pressing business community, steady orders for the jukebox market, techno, dance, reggae, and rap orders, and this year's 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. 'Elvis has been good to us. I can't complain,' says Cris Ashworth, the company's owner."
There doesn't have to be a huge market to support a business when there isn't much competition.
The Demand for vinyl from the DJ industry (techno, trip hop, rap, and the like) shouldn't be slowing down too much, Especially with new prime time hits buy groups like the Gorillias (Produced by Dan the Automator).
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
From here
All my friends are DJ's. I see a lot of vinyl...
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
This makes perfect sense that their business is booming. There's still no easy way for DJs to spin CDs on the fly. With a vinyl record, adjusting tempo is easily achieved by changing the speed of the turntable. And who could forget the popular "scratch." With a CD all you can do is fade the volume when it's time for the next song.
they're 'spinning' anything from mp3s to cds with final scratch.
free (as in mp3s) electronic music
I used to love when a _Mad Magazine_ or _National Geographic_ came with an Evatone Soundsheet. It would be great to see those again.
Best Buy can have you arrested
I'm still wondering why the MPAA doesn't just go back to vinyl for everything. Much harder to rip an LP than a CD. They could bill it as the latest new technology. I mean most folks under 25 haven't even seen an LP...
All thanks to the portable adaptation recently.
Nowadays you just stick a CD into a $50 player sitting on the table and get just as good a sound, and you don't have to worry about dust nearly as much.
I don't miss LPs.
I do miss the cover art, though. Cover art is why I still have about 50 of them.
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Howhard would it be to make a device that could write LP's? I have no idea, but I think DJ's would love to have something like this - they could buy the music on CD (so you keep good quality backups), and write them when they need it.
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
In United States that may be true. In Europe, the situation is not the same. Electronic music and DJ culture have strong influence on producers of vinyls. Factory in Czech republic, in the city Lodenice is known for one of the best qualities available on the market. Even Madonna's SPs made from coloured vinyl were produced there.
I best be goin' down there and git me some disks at hoe-sale prices so I can lay down the phat scratch! Aight!
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For today's FoxTrot
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
you'll still be able to cut your own vinyl. A snip at only $10,000 and $7 a blank :)
Vinyl still has a massive hold on the DJ industry, but it's slipping... Just my 0.02.
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow...
'Elvis has been good to us. I can't complain.'
I have a hard time believing that, seeing as he's been working at the 7-11 on the corner of my neighborhood for the last 6 years. The most good he's ever done for me is push the button on the QuickPicks machine, winning me $5.00.
One largish (say 13inch) dinner plate.
Some candle wax
Heat wax
Poor onto plate
Put vinal in waxy plate
Allow to cool
Peal off
Maybe not a perfect copy, but it's the easiest way I know to play Iron Man backwards.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Actually, few DJs use records unless it's just for show (or they don't want to figure out the new high-tech equipment because they're not real bright...). Many, if not most professional DJs use purely digital equipment, to include digitally controlled lighting. It takes a bit more to learn the higher tech equipment, and of course it costs a whole lot more money but it's worth it in the end.
This is something I think I know a little bit about. For years the family business has been a DJ/Karaokee business, and quite a profitable one, too. The fact that I also keep in close contact with other DJs and KJs in the area also helps me keep an eye on what other people are doing. MP3s, MCGs, and CDs played back through professional decks occupy almost all of the DJ scene. I don't DJ personally, but I do help maintain the equipment which can be a job all it's own.
With high end CD decks, it's possible to do anything that can be done with a record, and in fact it can be done better. Can it be done cheaper, easier, and without figuring out a bunch of controls with vinyl? Sure it can. But with a CD you won't be damaging your source material when you use it and you can also do some pre-production mixing that is beat-perfect without the risk of live-show error (which is both bad for your reputation and embarassing.)
If you want the best in professional CD decks, there's no shortage of sources, but if you want some high quality MP3 and MCG players, I recommend taking a look at these guys. They can supply you with both the hardware and legal copies of karaokee songs for use in your shows. As for music, it's possible to simply rip the music you paid for the proper way, assuming you're doing it legal. (Of course you ARE, aren't you?)
If you want to keep up to speed with what's going on in the DJ Business, also try the DJ magazines...
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Tube amplifiers do have a sweet, sweet sound. Tubes mostly produce even-order harmonic distortion, which is pleasing to the ear. The warmth stems from this coloration. It might not be an accurate reproduction of the source material, but many people prefer it. To people who prefer this coloration, transistors do sound sterile.
Digital distortion, on the other hand, often results in odd-order distortion, and is ugly.
Your attitude is about as reasonable as theirs.
There's still a lot of punk bands making vinyl. I like how it looks and how it sounds. Go into an independent record store and you just might find a punk vinyl section with some new stuff, even major punk bands like NOFX still put out vinyl releases. My band Black Monday just did a run of 1000 7 inch vinyl singles (in red vinyl!) on a label named split seven records. Check out the site.
NASHVILLE, TN (Reuters) - With the expansion of the vinyl industry, executives are looking towards technology to further their cause.
It has been a long time since music aficionados flocked to the record stores for vinyl records. With the advent of digital media such as CDs, CD-Rs, and the internet, it is possible to get the music you want quickly and easily, without having to leave your home. Furthermore, fans can make their own mixed compilations of their favorite music.
The vinyl industry here in Nashville is trying to capture that magic. Engineers are hard at work on the LP-R, and the LP-R drive. LP-R stands for Long Play Recorder, and is a throwback to the lingo vinyl enthusiasts used.
"We were gonna try for 7"-R, but saying 'seven-inch-arrr' just wasn't catchy enough," Buckaroo Banzai said. "Instead, we're going for the behemoth of vinyl, the LP!"
Here at the test labs of the Hong Kong Cavaliers, the press was introduced to the world's first LP-R drive. Fitting in the 5.25" bay of a personal computer, and expanding to a full-sized drive at the touch of a button, the LP-R drive can take blank LP-R media and burn LPs on the fly!
"We've only got it recording at 2x speed right now, but pretty soon we're gonna introduce the same technology we used to make splat-proof watermelons, and up the burn rates to 52x," one engineer stated.
The industry is buzzing with talk of LP-RW drives, and even a portable unit codenamed "the iLPod." Fan reaction has been phenomenal, with one fan exlaiming: "Holy CRAP! i've been waiting for this for YEARS! vinyl sounds so warm and smooth, and i can't WAIT to burn all my mp3s onto LP-Rs! Hell, even 32kbps mp3s sound MAGICAL!"
Another fan bared her breasts in support of the Hong Kong Cavaliers.
Pearl Jam (the band, not the... err... stuff) releases all of their albums on Vinyl first (a practice they've done at least since their second release in 1993.) The band members have a love of vinyl, and that's mainly the purpose.
The fan club singles they release every year are also only put out on vinyl. An interesting note: it was a trip to the Library of Congress that sealed this decision: vinyl, unlike tape and CD is impervious to time and will not break down if it is protected from damage, unlike magnetic and optical formats (tapes and CDs)
I have no idea who presses the Pearl Jam vinyls. I do know that PJ's album "Vitalogy" was the the last vinyl album to enter the billboard top 100 list.
Although I have made proper vinyl here in the US (through United, Rainbow, and a couple other mom n'pops now extinct) for releases on my indie record label (shameless plug - http://deathbombarc.com) I have been much more fond of making LATHE CUTS. A fellow named Peter King in New Zealand cooks up his own version of vinyl (actualy some type of plastic he makes which is clear!) and then cuts each record by hand. It would be impossible to make thousands of records this way, but it a miracle for small bands that can only sell may 30-100 copies of their album/single while on brief weekend tours and whatnot. Besides this, Peter can shape the records in anyway you like. I made a lathe cut through Peter that was shaped like an X!!! If you are interested, his only website is a fan site, but it does have pretty accurate rate info. Fax or call him for a quote though, as the fellow doesn't have an internet connection... http://home.attbi.com/~cassetto/kingcontact.html
we're just marketing. marketing our bad attitudes.
Yesterday we were talking about using IDE drives as long term backup media. Why not vynal?
They holdup well with reasonable care. Many jukeboxs are still playing records from the 50's. They are not effected by magnetic field. They also take stratched better the cd's and dvd's.
I would love to backup a gig to a 45.
If you think and 45 is a gun, your too young to understand this post.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
The whole point of live performance is that something is being created on the fly that will never happen just that way again. This applies to a musician OR a DJ. I'd much rather go see a DJ mixing and matching as s/he goes. Darn, some things won't be perfect. But some things will be done so amazingly well that I'll remember the mad mix skillz of that DJ for the rest of my life.
DJs create music. Anything else is just a jukebox.
You're obviously not getting out to the dance/Hip Hop clubs then...
For years the family business has been a DJ/Karaokee business
Ah, wedding singer type DJs. They don't even mix the music. They cue up one track after another. Winamp can do that. I know people who would kill you for calling that DJing.
With high end CD decks, it's possible to do anything that can be done with a record, and in fact it can be done better.
Try telling that to Grand Master Flash. I'm sure anyone who has seen him live would agree that you can't do what he does on a CD deck.
simply rip the music you paid for the proper way, assuming you're doing it legal.
Most professional DJs (e.g. those with a club residency) don't buy the music. They get given it for free on white labels. It's a great promotion for the song, so I doubt the record industry is going to come after you for promoting their material... ;-)
Since cassettes came out, Vinyl has always had somewhat of a cult following. From audiophiles who liked the 'warm' vinyl sound better than hissy cassettes to the punk-rock scene, and of course nowadays, hip hop and techno dj's..
Sure, there's new digital equipment that lets you mix and even scratch .. but nothing better than putting your finger over the record, adjusting the pitch control and mixing a perfect beat.. As far as scratching goes, you can see the influence this has made in a lot of today's music. From rock bands with dj's (limp bizkit, incubus, linkin' park) to even jazz artists (courtney pine, herbie hancock). The turntable has turned into an instrument with the help of turntablists like q-bert, dj shadow, kid koala, etc.
As far as record pressers go, there's plenty of places out there cutting vinyl for hip hop/club/and techno producers. There's also a lot of independent places that do it for a lot less..
Recently, Vestax introduced a Vinyl cutter for under $10,000 (about 8400).
Overall, I'm glad vinyl is still around after all these years. I doubt it will go away anytime soon.
I wonder how much breakage they have in the production line for vinyl records.
After all, the RIAA subtracts an 11% 'laquer breakage' allowance from artists' royalties. They don't do laquer any more, but I wonder what the breakage is for vinyl, or even for CDs.
I know, pointless barb, but I'd like to see a lawyer go after this one. No doubt the padding would appear somewhere else.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Frequency Response: digital music *must* filter out everything above half its sample rate (plus or minus a few hertz for data). Conventional CD's filter out everything above 22kHz. some people can hear a 25kHz pitch, some cannot. but nearly everyone can hear the interaction of 24 and 25, which can manifest itself within their hearing range. recording techniques improve this situation, and higher sampling rates are coming, but this is still a fundamental limit.
Dynamic Range: analog music naturally compresses from the quietest to the loudest portions in much the same way the human ears work. when you go to a really loud concert, does the sound clip? no, your ears compress the sound. digital music can emulate this with algorithms, and some of them are quite good, but again, all decent analog equipment does this as a side effect, and no digital recorder will ever get this excatly right (although digital recordings can best the 96dB range that good tape machines can offer, does anyone listen to music in a *totally silent* environment?)
Simplicity: no processing is required to record/play analog. the medium is a physical imprint of the sound waves in the room as a function of time. all you need is a magnet and some energy.
Of course, analog media is not as convienient as modern digital media, but since I have a home with the space in my home, I will keep listening to my big, bulky, dusty records because they just sound better.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Digital music has exactly zero distortion. I have tried this, output a sine wave and link it back to the input on a Sound Blaster. Doing a FFT on the result shows no harmonics at all above the noise floor, which is 100+ dB down.
You are right in that tube amplifiers do introduce a coloration, but this is mostly in frequency response. I have recently done a search, both over the web and in my dead tree files, for tube circuits to build. All of the schematics I could find, from the simplest single-tube amplifiers to a 10 tube per channel RIAA phono pre-amp, have worse performance, from the frequency flatness point of view, than very simple solid-state amplifiers. This is because tube amplifiers have very high output impedances and they interact with the following stage input capacitance.
About the even-odd harmonics, the worse culprit in solid-state is the output AB-class stage. If the bias level on the output stage is not adjusted exactly to spec (in most amps it isn't adjustable at all), third order harmonics can be very high. Of course, some people debate this point endlessly, but I'm not certain that second-order harmonics are intrinsically more pleasing to the ear than third order. I think it's more the absolute level of the distortion that matters.
BEcause the DJ scene is so important in europe there has recently been shortages in vinyl manufacturing capacity. I hear a lot of UK companies are having to outsource their vinyl pressing to the Czech Republic to make their release dates.
Personally I'm a vinyl junkie, I spend over $5000 a year on hard to find vinyl, and I DJ a few weekly events. Of course all this is funded by my day job as a software developer (I was working at napster until recently). I wrote a digital mixing application for linux about 6 years ago, back then mp3 wtill wasn't really standardised so I used Raw CDR audio, or Mpeg Layer 2. The UI on any digital mixing application sucks compared to vinyl, Final scratch is close but has too many shortcomings (where's the vorbis support?).
The other somewhat dubious advantage of vinyl is that the music industry's lawyers see to be more tolerant of short run vinyl bootlegs of tracks which could never get released legally - Usually mashups of Britney Spears vs Nirvana over a 4 to the floor beat. If that was put out as an mp3 or CD they'd probably be more aggressive, but vinly tends to only go to DJ's who can make a decent argument about promoting music. I'm not saying litigation is uneard of, but It's very rare.
All of the above have problems though for any DJ who plays house, pop, any form of techno/dnb/IDM/trance etc. I'd say my experience here in Toronto is that a small minority of DJ's use CD decks like the pioneer CDJ-1000. Those who do complain about their inability to get new records. You have to understand that in dance music most remixes come on vinyl and the underground releases "white labels" which often contain tracks with uncleared samples or bootleg remixes. The sorta stuff trendy clubbers and raves go nuts for.
Absolutely 0 (zero) scratch artists use digital machines. Their haptic interfaces aren't nearly as robust as vinyl. The basis of urban/electronic music is sampling. The catalog of vinyl records out there is huge and most of all they're cheap! To this day most hip-hop is produce like so: Sample a record into an Akai MPC, re-arrange and have an MC rap on top of it. Sure you could get your hot James Brown beat on a CD in some greatest hits or remastered disc but this is music from the ghetto. "Real" hip-hoppers are poor and even when they make their millions and are dripping with ice and fat chains they still use records. Vinyl is cultural. All of these new digital products definitely have their creative niches though. Ming & Fs use CDJ-1000's exclusively so they don't have to get acetate pressings of their records while they do extensive touring. Lots of people use traktor and final scratch to play their own new material that they aren't yet ready to commit to a a short run of records.
I guess my point is that even though CD/MP3/OGG/Whatever units are more economically and technologically advanced vinyl is cultural. An analogy would be between a string section in an orchestra and some of the more advanced MIDI keyboards we have today. To the untrained ear a synthesized string pad sounds the same as a performed one. But classical music is an instituition. There are professionals who've trained for decades to play their instruments. Telling them to replace their Strad with a Korg Trinton keyboard would be laughable. DJ's are no different, scratching and mixing is no less challenging. I have the unique position of being both a classical viola player AND somebody who likes to play a few records. I dunno what DJ Scene you're from but here in Toronto which is home of a very vibrant urban/electronic/dance music scene a large majority of DJs use vinyl.
_nfotxn
Audiogalaxy was the place to get MP3s though, they'd have the latest acid techno tracks ripped within a day of release. None of the other music services come close in terms of content.
I still have the same phonograph I bought as a kid (30 years ago), and needed to replace the cartridge (the device that holds the stylus and converts vibrations to electricity). Not only was it inexpensive, but it fit into the old spot perfectly.
Meanwhile... I can't just upgrade the motherboard in my 3-year old case, because the case is an AT, and all the new MB's are ATX. Want to bet that as soon as I buy an ATX case, the manufacturers will move to a new "improved" standard?
I DJ a bit, techno/house/jungle/hardcore etc. and even with all this hype about CD turntables and "iPod DJs", vinyl is the choice medium. Most promos and singles are released on 12" long before CDs, and definately long before they are included on any album.
Besides, digital cannot reproduce the rich fullness of broken-in vinyl basslines, especially at high volume. Needle wear, and even the initial recording process produce extra curves in the recorded sounds, whereas digital picks up every single square corner of the wave accurately and completely, which gives it that "clear but cold" sound which so many audiophiles complain of. Vinyl adds some smoothing to the process. Worn midrange-highend also adds a bit of character (not too worn, mind you, there is definately a cutoff point), as the slight distortion not only gives the impression that the sound is louder than it really is but helps clarify it amongst the heavy low-end.
That, and it's just not as much fun to spin a plastic controller wheel to align beats as it is to actually spin the platter with your hand. Vinyl is a truely interactive medium. A CD turntable is just that: a CD player with advanced fast forward/rewind, but a turntable is like dragging a bow across a string, you are actually the generating vibrations, not some DAC in a black box.
It is for these reasons I believe vinyl will never die. However, I don't believe it will ever be anything but a niche market.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I just went and say the exhibit at the ICA tonight. This stuff is pretty cool. The basic premise is that there was a missing link in home recording and this product really should have existed at some point. The images, music and cover art of the vinyl is super nice.
[Please type your sig here.]
FACT: most people can hear up to at least 30 kHz. No, they cannot hear a pure sine wave at that frequency. But they can hear a difference if such frequencies are or are not present in the music. Moreover, almost all music contains such frequencies. No, not as pure sine waves. And it is not even the harmonics that cause the effect. Rather, because to duplicate the waveform transients, you must have the high frequencies. (Think Fourier.)
Yes, such transients are reproduced on vinyl. No, they are not reproduced on CD.
There are various controlled studies demonstrating these things. Since you are such an authority, I shouldn't need to give you references, but since I'm so magnanimous, I'll give a few anyway:
91: 3207 [1991].
Your final star'ed points are just dumb. You don't give any references, because of course you don't have any. Get a good turntable/arm/cartridge. The reverse of most of what you say is true. E.g. your claim of 60dB dynamic range is nuts: the range is over 100 dB. You are confusing the noise floor of a high-hiss record with dynamic range--but you can hear 20 dB into that noise, and a good record need not have high hiss. Vinyl has poor bass??? It's much better than CD. And so on.
And I even keep buying new albums on vinyl. The reason is very simple: No copy prevention.