A record pressing resource page?

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Hammerstone

Hammerstone

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Greetings fellows. I've had an idea floating around in my head for a while now, and I think it's worth sharing. Back in April, I emailed Michael Fremer who writes for Stereophile and is editor of analogplanet.com about more complete information on various pressing plants. There is some good information on his site mentioning pressing plants that turn out bad records, and also good and bad record-mastering engineers. He was busy, and I became busy, so nothing has come of it yet, but it's still a dream I have, and I could use your help to realize it.

What I'm thinking is this: I would (one day) like to press albums to vinyl. I think that YOU would also like to press records to vinyl also. And the fact that you guys all care enough to record on analog means that you probably want the resulting record to sound as good as possible, as do I.

Why not then, get a page together with as much information in one place, so people know what options they have, and which is the best route for them to go? I'm not looking to bash any engineers or pressing plants, but it would be nice to know which ones to avoid, and which ones to give your custom. I know Lonewhitefly has pressed to vinyl, are there others here? Anyone willing to share their experiences - good stories, horror stories, etc?

Here's some stuff I've found out so far:

Aardvark Mastering in Denver, CO (not too far from me) has a great site filled with wonderful information about the entire process, plus a list of pressing plants they ship lacquers to. They

Analog Planet is not a fan of United Record Pressing (Nashville) or Rainbo Records (Canoga Park, CA). There's a lot of information there if you have the time to look...haven't been in a while so I can't quite remember where all the pertinent posts are, but here are a few:
This is What "Non-Fill" Looks Like | Analog Planet
Reissue Labels To Avoid and Some Best to Proceed With Caution | Analog Planet
Analog Corner #16 | Analog Planet

.

That's all I have for now, but I look forward to hearing from you guys!
 
I would like to see this information corralled. One of my goals has been to release to vinyl, so being able to access this information would be great!
 
This is a problem I have found.. and to me it is a BIG problem! Most of the record plants pressing vinyl these days will take your source tape and dump it into a COMPUTER to format it for their pressing devices.
Just go listen to most any new vinyl out there.. and if you have a quality set up for vinyl playback, you won't have to listen for more than 5 seconds to realize you just bought a CD pressed on Vinyl! You will see digitally remastered stuff pressed on vinyl. I don't know if anyone is going to do it the old school way and feed an analog signal to the cutter direct from your 1/4 or 1/2 half track master tape. I hope there is someone out there that does it right. I have some stuff ready to press, but also want to find the person who will do it correctly. Otherwise, I might as well just press CD. That to me is a nightmare because I do not listen to digital music if I can avoid I will.
 
Astralography said:
This is a problem I have found.. and to me it is a BIG problem! Most of the record plants pressing vinyl these days will take your source tape and dump it into a COMPUTER to format it for their pressing devices.
Click to expand...

Whoever it was that cut the master for Lonewhitefly's EP did so all-analogue, using a special machine with an extra delay head for playback. But I don't know who it was.
 
Yes Lonewhitefly's 7" was cut all-analog. There are people out there who still do it the right way. I think that you do need either 2 tape decks or one with an extra headstack. From what I've found, most mastering engineers I've come across still have the ability to cut a lacquer using the tape, though they usually charge extra for that. Now, whether or not those guys use digital delay or not when cutting I couldn't say, so I'd definitely get a lot of info from whoever you were thinking of using before you commit.
 
I've not pressed anything to vinyl, but I have put out a cassette. Here's how it worked for me: I used National Audio Company, and originally started the ball rolling at the beginning of this year (2013) when they were advertising a damn good price (149.00 for 100 copies professionally imprinted, manufactured, with artwork, sealed). This being my first time I wanted to make sure things came out satisfactorily so when I sent in my order I asked for a test cassette. It's free, but does add some time to the process (they say double, but I think that's their maximum turnaround time). Now I had talked to them last year and the lady running orders and customer relations (Sam) is super nice, helpful, and quick to respond to emails, plus you can call her too, if you need to. I had talked to Sam about an all-analog cassette release which isn't really what they do. They take whatever the source is and do some basic mastering through a computer before transferring back onto tape for copying and I gather that they don't have any experience with anything else since Sam couldn't answer all my questions. She did however, put me on hold and track down one of their mastering engineers to get more answers out of him, and from what I understand, the only way to do an all-analog release would be to use some of their old Telex machines - she didn't recommend that, said it would sound a lot worse...I wonder if those are the ones that run at high speed and so the tapes have a high limit of about 12kHz. From what I understand about their process, all the cassettes are made from 1/4" tape anyway, so I don't see why someone couldn't master their own project on tape and just have them copy it for them, but I don't have the right equipment to take advantage of that anyway, so I didn't press the issue.

It was actually finding this out that influenced my decision to mix down digitally to cd. My mixdowns to cassette weren't all that satisfactory, I didn't have much better options in the analog world, my multitracks were 1/4" at 7.5ips, and mixing digitally I was able to use digital delay, reverb, and 4-band EQ. Plus, I just uploaded WAV files to National Audio's FTP server so I used all the advantages of digital on a project recorded on tape. What I love about cassettes anyway is that extra bit of saturation when it's done just right, and that's why I'd rather listen to a cassette over a cd.

So by the time I had my test tape in my hands it was March (took 6 business weeks, plus another one for delivery). The tape sounds virtually indistinguishable from my digital files, and you can listen yourself at my bandcamp page; all online files were made by digitizing my test tape. When I okayed the tape we started working on the artwork which proved a bit difficult actually. I tried to follow their website's templates as closely as possible with the consideration that all I have to work with is Microsoft Paint, but it seems that they don't really follow their templates, so all this extra border around (what is supposed to be) the finished artwork got included in the artwork. It took a couple back and forth emails to convey what I was looking for, and ultimately I'm not *quite* happy with how it turned out. I had sent them files 4 times larger than they needed but I think that they took the final sized file (4"x4"), cropped that where I had specified, and then expanded it slightly to bring it back to 4"x4". I didn't find out until I got the finished cassettes back and it isn't that noticeable, just slightly more pixellated than it looked on my computer. I was so excited to have them that I didn't make a fuss, but next time, I'll know not to send them image files with extra border. I say next time, because I will definitely use them again. As someone who can't afford to press albums to vinyl, a limited run of 100 cassettes is definitely a good 2nd option.

That whole business took a week, and then they were making my album, so I thought it would be another 6-7 business weeks before I saw them (end of May), but Sam sent me an email early in April that they were being shipped the next day, and I got them just a few days later! Kudos. One other thing I didn't realize from the start was that they don't charge your credit card until they ship out the order. From when I had started the order (end of January) to when it shipped (early April) their prices had been raised $10.00, but that wasn't a big deal. My final cost was approx. $170.00 shipped (media mail from Missouri to Colorado was 10.00), which is a hell of a deal for 100 copies of an album that could have been just cd-r's with my handwriting in sharpie.

Instead, they look like this:
00011.webp

Am I 100% happy with my album release? Hell no, but the end product is entirely my responsibility and I think NAC did their job admirably. I have nothing but respect for how they turned my scrappy no-budget project into something that looks like it kind of belongs right between Dave Grusin and the Jesus and Mary Chain on my shelf. Knowing what I do now, I think I would take my original digitized files, do some high-grade noise reduction on them, and put some dynamic compression on the entire album...it has none really, and listening anywhere but the living room can be a bit interesting (maybe NAC can do that for me in their mastering process, but I didn't know to ask). I'd also probably work closer with NAC to get some nice tape saturation on the cassettes, like maybe requesting they transfer them at +2dB or something. It's something I'm really looking forward to, but first I have to sell my first 100 copies...

If you want physical copies of your album but don't have the ability at the moment to make 500+ vinyl copies, I definitely recommend going to cassetro.com and getting yourself some cassettes. As of the time of the writing, their music package special starts out something like this:
100 chrome cassette tapes (wouldn't use cobalt, but maybe that's just me), choice of cassette and ink colors, professional imprinting, full-color 3-panel j-card (front and back) and sealed plastic wrapping for $189.00 (yeah it's gone up a bit but it's still a pretty good price). Go check them out!

(so this is kind of what I'm hoping to get out of more of you! Please share your experiences)
 
Mission of Burma reissue

Here is a series of videos with George Marino at Sterling Sound going through an all-analog vinyl mastering session (Mission of Burma reissue albums). Here's a tape deck with the additional playback head like the one used to cut Lonewhitefly's EP.







 
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