Vinyl records now in crisis: Apollo Transco Mastering lacquer plant is a total loss*

True.

 

Absolutely! It’s programmed into each piece of vinyl that if lacquers should ever be unavailable, that all previously pressed vinyl shall self destruct!

Actually...you bring up a good point. If we’ve been collecting vinyl for a while, at least we likely have most everything we want and we probably, as a collective group, buy a lot of reissues. Not the end of the world if we have to just keep hunting for vintage pressings. And really, most new music isn’t recorded all that well so a vinyl release isn’t that big a deal even though I was buying new releases anyway. The only spectacular audiophile grade pop album I’ve heard in a long time is Madonna’s Madame X....the vinyl is stunning. But that is the rare exception if your favorite genre is pop music.

 

Handheld stylus! Crazy. Also no gloves in either video, for any step, nor breathing masks.

 

Prior to this disaster, I was unaware of the role acetates played in the vinyl record manufacturing process. I have many playable acetates myself (my father was a recording artist so I have many of his, and a few of some other artists), so I always just assumed that acetates were a type of playable yet ephemeral "test record" used for promotion or to gauge sound quality before the commitment of making stamps and pressing vinyl occurs.

I had no idea that acetates were actually a vital STEP in the record-making process. Very interesting.

 

If the supply of lacquers is interrupted for a few years, maybe we could go back to cutting on wax. Solid wax discs were the only way to go before lacquers hit the market in 1934. Flowcoats (flowed wax on a metal or glass base) were developed at Bell Labs around the same time, as a way to minimize pre-echo on vertical-cut transcriptions. This video, which has been posted on the forum before, shows flowed wax being used at RCA Victor in the early forties.

Wax shouldn't require making specialized machines to the extent needed by lacquer production. A candle factory could make a wax disc. You'd have to figure out the best way to cut on wax (cutting stylus material and tip shape, temperature) as it's probably been 75 years since anyone did it professionally.

 

Just checked out the Google images. The facility exterior looks quite clean. Any outside drums are likely down the street at another (non-Apollo) facility. That exhaust stack in the back (the small fenced area) could be associated with a fume incinerator. That might have been the most cost effective way to deal with the small amount of solvent fumes. An air handling failure getting fumes to the incinerator might also have been the weak link that caused the catastrophe (sadly, I've been in that scenario). The apparent ferocity of the fire once it started certainly lends to the possibility of nitrocellulose.

The thick black smoke in the pictures I saw might just be the roofing. It could also be everything that could burn going up quickly.

Modern acrylic lacquers will certainly burn when dry, but if water-based they aren't easy to get started. If there was a gas leak in the facility, that would easily be enough fuel to burn everything.

 

I didn't know what DMM processing meant so I looked it up on Wikipedia:

"DMM LP pressings are sometimes described as having a harshness or forwardness in the high frequencies. The fact the groove is cut to copper, a hard metal, and not to soft lacquer, nitrocellulose, supposedly endows DMM vinyl LP with a very different tonality to traditionally manufactured vinyl LP pressings. Direct metal mastering requires a radically different cutting angle than traditional (lacquer) cutting, almost 0 degrees.[3] However the playback cartridges will always have the standard playback angle of 15–22.5°. Thus, the DMM process includes electronic audio processing [4] so the records can be played with a standard cartridge despite having been cut at a substantially different angle. This electronic processing might account for the supposedly different high frequency "signature sound" of DMM records."

This sounds like potentially bad news for my high pitch sensitive hearing and for anyone else who prefers a more warm analog sound. It's one of the reasons I went back to analog vinyl in the first place. When my auditory nerves were damages, I found warm analog sound far more ear friendly. I hope some of that equipment can be salvaged or restored!

 

Were the lacquers made out of cellulose nitrate or acetate?

Acetate isn't nearly as flammable as cellulose nitrate. Kodak switched to acetate film in the 1950s because of the fire hazard of the old celluloid film which was so flammable that sometimes it would ignite from the heat of the lightbulb in the film projector.

 

The term "acetate" may be a misnomer but it goes back pretty much all the way to the beginning. In the thirties some radio transcriptions were *pressed* in acetate. Compared to the usual shellac, they were quieter, lighter in weight, and less likely to be broken in transit. Lacquer discs were also *cut* to be played back by radio stations, and on some of the sleeves the instruction "use needle for acetate" is printed. (Shellac records can survive steel needles and very high tracking forces that will destroy lacquer, acetate and vinyl.) So this is probably how this type of disc came to be called an acetate, even though it's actually cellulose nitrate. The term stuck for records that are cut to be played back, while a disc cut to create a metal master is called a lacquer.

 

Maybe this is a new thread but started to compile a list as I fell asleep last night of LPs we’ll likely not see for the foreseeable future:

- Gillian Welch Time (The Revelator)
- All new proposed archival Neil Young releases “in the can” (I’m assuming we’re getting Homegrown given that Neil posted an image of the the test pressing?)
- Tom Petty Wildflowers (unless they’re use the box set CB plates)
- AAA Beatles stereo or US pressings.
- Any new album ever.

I guess this list could get pretty large but those are the first that come to mind.

 

Ok, thank you for making that distinction. So "modern" lacquers and the "acetate" records that I have from the 1950s-1970s, (that smell funny and get a white coating on them) are actually made of cellulose, NOT acetate?

 

I guess the price of vinyl may fo up now?

 

No real reason for it to.

 

Yes, nitrocellulose as a coating on aluminum. (Steel and cardboard were sometimes used for home recordings, and glass during WWII when aluminum wasn't available.)

 

Yikes! So, they're flammable, then. I always assumed the coating was actually acetate.

 

Is the vinyl record industry bad for the environment? Exclusive Update at ten after the movie.

 

I could be entirely wrong about this, as I don’t know the foundational infrastructure at all really, but my hunch is that it would be easier to up the capacity of DMM pressers and keep the pacing of vinyl revival going for the masses (maybe at a slower pace, granted), and the people that will really care about those hifi pressings are the ones that are going to feel this more in the next couple of years as stuff gets rebuilt.

My reasoning is this - record companies aren’t pressing to vinyl as some kind of favor to us...all these pressing plants aren’t opening all over the world for nothing...there’s money to be made. And I bet the industry will find some kind of solution (likely not the best solution for sound, mind you) to try their best to keep up with demand in the short term.

Again, just my gut feeling with no really data or intimate knowledge...

 

How many DMM lathes are there in existence of now? Is this list by any chance complete?

TSM - DMM Studios

 

I have one DMM record - Dire Straits Making Movies, and i do NOT like the way it sounds.

 

If you have a large collection o any diversity, you likely have many DMM records. I have at least 300 DMM records (and probably many more) on which there is no demarcation of their DMM origin. (I know this because I work for labels which only use DMM and a fair amount of friends in the business, and none of them mark it.

DMM can be good or bad, like most any mastering process. Just as it took the engineering world to gear up to specific demands of mastering compact discs, so it was with DMM vinyl. I've heard appalling and genius mastering jobs on both format. Both depend on innumerable factors and there's good and bad in both.

 

Precisely. I can think of one white Beatles DMM lp that occasionally gets lumped in with the finest pressings of that particular album. DMM isn't always a wash...I've heard good and bad pressings utilizing it.

 

Optimal has at least one DMM lathe, IIRC.

 

Precision Record Pressing in Burlington, Ontario also does DMM cuts and is not on that list.

 

I came across www.HDVinyl.org after researching this story and it sounds like an interesting, 21st century take on the process. Essentially the tracks are organized in software to find the best balance of play time and audio quality. The resulting file is then used to cut a stamper out of ceramic which is then used to press records.

While it’s not an AAA solution it seems quite elegant. Seems they’re trying to work out some quirks with process but perhaps this disaster help gets more people behind them to figure things out and scale up quickly?

 

They are another plant that works closely with GZ. There are no DMM lathes in North America*, GZ is handling their cuts.

*that are openly accessible.