But it’s hard to resurrect the presses.
What’s the best resolution you can get in a 3-D printer these days? Seems like that might be a good method.
I really need to get a new interconnect and cartridge for my Rega Planar 2 and Grace 707 tonearm.
10 thoughts on “Vinyl Is Back”
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Hey, I have one of those too! Still working as of a couple months ago. My Onkyo receiver has a phono input that works well with it, but I’m planning to resurrect my old Quad 33/303 combo with some new capacitors.
LP albums required a bit of concentration and dedication that is completely lacking in today’s MP3 music players. Also much easier to figure out your playlist.
I have a Conrad Johnson pre-amp that I rebuilt the power supply in a few years ago, when it was developing hum from failing electrolytic caps. But no reason to use it until I get a new cartridge and interconnect.
The cheap consumer plastic filament printers have an effective resolution of something like 0.2-0.3mm, but it’s more complicated than that; they’re effectively plotters rather than dot-matrix printers (and now I’ve dated myself…).
I think the high end stuff is maybe 10x better, but I’m not an expert. I guess there could be some specialized gear for ultra-high resolution.
“now I’ve dated myself”
Makes me think of a funny Dilbert cartoon:
Wally: …but then, I’m dating myself.
Dilbert: Well, it’s not like anyone else would.
All those years we hated the scratches, and the pops and static from dust and lint, and the phase distortion and all, and now they’ve come back from the grave. I don’t get it.
I don’t get it.
It’s snobbery. The same thing that drives bottled water, designer jeans, Starbuck’s coffee, etc.
There is some of that, but it is a different sound quality, and one that’s shocking to kids who’ve never heard anything except overcompressed MP3s. It is annoying how it’s become a hipster thing, though.
No 3D printer I’m aware of could match the resolution needed to produce a decent “vinyl” record. But I expect a specialized milling machine could be built without too much trouble to cut a record.
The machines originally used to cut the master disks could do that, but they only worked on metal disks coated in shellac. Directly cutting vinyl is a lot tougher as it is both much softer and much less brittle a material. It tends to both dive under a cutter and also to tear rather than cleanly shear.
It also softens appreciably for relatively modest rises in temperature. Any cutter gets hotter as it cuts until it reaches some sort of equilibrium temperature based on how deep a cut is being made and the speed with which the cutter is passing through the material.
Plastics tend not to be very tolerant of being cut by tools that get warmer than some fairly low maximum temperature. Above that, they semi or fully melt at the point of tool contact and the cut material no longer cleanly separates from the billet as chips but sticks to it. That would be disastrous for a vinyl record.
These are problems routinely encountered when trying to make mechanical parts from polymers such as Delrin on machine tools designed primarily to cut metal. It can be done, but it’s tricky to get good results.
So there are good reasons why most plastic parts are made by injection molding rather than machining. In addition to those already covered, there are also the matters of speed and material economics. Record pressing isn’t quite injection molding, but it’s a closely related technology.
Injection molding machines and record presses are consistently able to crank out plastic “parts” much faster than machine tools could carve them. They are also technologies that share, with 3-D printing, the characteristic of wasting little or no material. What sprue and flash is generated can be trimmed and recycled. That isn’t true of chips from a machine tool.
In the mid-70’s, when I fled the recession-ravaged economy and snow-covered topography of Michigan in search of employment and warmth in sunny SoCal, I found the former and probably more of the latter than was good for me at a little chemical company in Saugus in the desert of the Santa Clarita Valley north of Los Angeles.
This outfit, at that time, had a virtual lock on the U.S. production of vinyl plastic for LP records. It sold truckloads of the stuff to the pressing plants of all the major record labels. I recall probably the single largest customer as being the – I’m sure, now long-gone – Capitol Records plant in Santa Maria.
The company had its own small record-pressing plant where it did small runs of specialty records for customers such as church choirs. That press line had originally been the business when the founder started it just after WW2. His dissatisfaction with the quality of the vinyl he could buy from the DuPonts and United Carbides of the world led him to build a pilot plant to experiment with proprietary formulae and production processes, then to expand to – relatively – volume production.
When I signed on – in IT, not the production facility – the vinyl production tail had long since taken over nearly all the wagging from the record production dog. But records were still produced on-site. I remember the equipment being very mechanical and quite hydraulic. I think it was all of proprietary make too, rather than being store-bought.
As with pretty much every other firm in the vinyl recording ecosystem, my former employer went under and liquidated a decade and a half ago.
Even if the changes in music recording technology hadn’t laid them low first, the EPA, CARB, OSHA and the rest of the regulatory state would have likely done them in anyway. The main feedstock for vinyl plastic production is vinyl chloride, which arrived at the plant 50 to 100 tons at a time in railway tank cars. Vinyl chloride is classed by EPA as a carcinogen.