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

I'm glad to read some comments by Adam Gonsalves of Telegraph Mastering and confirmed that he has access to MDC lacquer disks. From the releases I own that was cut by Telegraph Mastering, they did a great job and I hope they continue their work.

He also commented about a "very big mastering house in Los Angeles" asking around for $25,000 worth of lacquer disks, is he's referring to Bernie Grundman Mastering or Capitol Studios?? That also made me think that the lacquer cutting community is more closely-knit than I expected.

 

Before the days of thin-film media; carbon coated cobalt plated or sputtered, polished and textured nickel (electroless) plated aluminum disks in computer disk drives, we spin coated, baked and polished gamma feric oxide epoxy pigments (relatives of magnetic tape coatings) onto aluminum disks; thick-film media.

Seems to me lacquer coated aluminum backing plates should be reusable, and even all of the lacquer cuttings and lacquer itself, once it's separated from the electroplated sputtered metallic seed layer, as lacquers simply dry/harden and don't chemically cure, meaning they will re-dissolve in the solvent originally used to liquify them, acetone possibly?

 

Acetone might be used to stick the laquer to the aluminum, but the lacquer itself is likely sprayed on with lacquer thinner as the solvent. Acetone acts as an adhesive for nitrocellulose, but it contributes to the destabilization of nitrocellulose over time. Another reason to use the discs quickly!

 

If necessity is the mother of invention - we now have necessity.

 

Hmmm, so what is the price of a lacquer I wonder?

Google found this:

Lacquer Sales and Pricing – NiPro Records

So I guess that mastering house might be looking for about 700 lacquers.

Well, these seem to be cheaper than I might have thought, about $30 a pop.

How many lacquers would the industry consume in a year?

 

I think a this point, the remaining plants all over the world should be investing time in scanning every hard copy document they have on any of this technology. It (sadly) takes a disaster to move people into perversering critical information. Rather than waiting for the next fire, one would have hoped that an effort to backwards engineer the machines we have has been made. Along with picking every surviving brain, maybe they could even employ them to train younger staff.

 

For those so inclined...How to make your own lacquer blank discs.

Who knows, this could be the start of a cottage industry.

 

Yes. Institutional knowledge should never be underestimated. And must be nurtured and passed down. Apprentices, training videos, interns, and one on one training. Written manuals (with photos, diagrams, and flowcharts) can be useful as reference but hands on training is critical.

 

Very informative.

 

I did notice a manual printed from the AES (Audio Engineers Society) on there. You would think they’d have technical manuals in their archives as well.

 

"Houston, we have a problem".

 

I doubt any of their releases are AAA.

 

If it can't be done with vacuum deposition, as you say, then lower-tech methods must suffice. That only reduces the likely capital outlay, so that's good. I'm just trying to help define the problem, not state absolute solutions. If Apollo throws in the towel, someone in this country is going to build a facility to make lacquers, so a description of a modernized process for doing this could be useful.

So, vacuum deposition is out. Do you think they're spraying the nitrocellulose solution onto the cores? I did find a little description of what Apollo's method is on their website (see below). They don't actually say how they apply the lacquer. They do imply the polishing process for the substrate aluminum is mechanical and then ultrasonically cleaned, rather than electropolishing. That process could be updated using electropolishing in a new facility. Electropolishing will produced a very smooth surface that is perfectly clean, so a single step process. Also, you can electropolish many cores at one time, whereas a mechanical polisher (using the multi-step process used in the production of hard disk drives) can only do one at a time.

Apollo Lacquer Master - The Most Polished Performer:

Aluminum substrates of sufficiently high quality must be used for lacquer masters.

Initially developed for the manufacture of computer memory discs, this elaborate, multi-step polishing process totally removes the original surfaces on both sides of the blank, thus eliminating all dips, pits, bubbles, rolling marks and other imperfections. If not removed such defects would show up, magnified, in the lacquer coating surfaces.

As a result of this super-polishing operation, we have a plentiful supply of flawless substrates.

Mastering The Master:

The greatest formulation and finest raw materials cannot by themselves assure a perfect product.

This is particularly true when manufacturing lacquer masters. To produce consistently superior masters, all manufacturing processes must be scrupulously and continuously controlled. The operations must be performed in well-equipped facilities with highly trained personnel.

Apollo's factory in Banning is ideally suited to produce such masters. We feel it is the most modern and sophisticated of its type in the world.

Our Exclusive Lacquer Formulation:

The ingredients, which must meet unusually tight specifications, are compounded in our Banning plant. The formulation and the process of preparing it are totally proprietary and not available to any other lacquer master manufacturer.

These developments in aluminum and lacquer formulations allow us to exercise complete control over the critical raw materials, thus minimizing the major difficulties experienced in the manufacturing of lacquer masters.


It Out-Performs Every Master Ever Made:

After polishing, the aluminum blanks are washed in special ultrasonic cleaners to render them totally free from oils and other residues.

The degree of blending and filtering that the lacquer formulation under goes and the resulting smoothness and consistency are amazing. The aluminum and the lacquer come together in the coating room. There, the automatic coaters perform the critical step of depositing a perfectly even layer of lacquer on the aluminum blank.

Even the apparently simple drying and curing process is an example of modern control systems. Throughout the process, all the parameters are continuously monitored.

All masters are 100% visually inspected to insure the absence of any imperfections in the cutting area. Only the surfaces which meet such criteria are accepted for Apollo Masters. Those which do not are rejected. The accepted lacquers are then coded to identify the manufacturing date, as well as other information about the process and materials.

 

Wow. That's a lot.

 

But I think it's about right. Up-thread somebody posted a link of mastering rooms but most of the ones I know of, many of them major, weren't on it. Capitol Records and Bernie Grundman for starters, and several other places with multiple rooms. There are lots and lots of small mastering rooms that sort of fly under the radar but combined, their output adds up a lot of sides.

 

Ha! A few days ago I was going to remark that within a year you would be able to buy lacquer discs from someone on Etsy, I didn't know how right I was!

 

Joe Harley quote:
"Major fire at Transco/Apollo in CA. yesterday. They manufacture 90% of the world's lacquers that mastering engineers cut to. This is a major disaster for the vinyl business. Thank goodness, Kevin Gray stopped using them over two years ago, preferring the MDC lacquers from Japan. So there will be no effect on our beloved Tone Poet titles that are coming this year. But no doubt this is truly tragic for lovers of vinyl records"

 

I think this depends on the project and the quality of the lacquer disks, which can vary depending if they are free of defects or not.

@MrRom92 was with Ryan K Smith at Sterling Sound to cut his release and came across a problematic batch from Apollo Mastering, going through 6-7 of the disks.

Industry-wide, nobody has even a rough idea. The best we can do is to talk to every lacquer cutting engineer and try to extrapolate from there.

 

Some of the AAA VMP stuff, such as Saxophone Colossus, comes from older metal parts. But quite a few of them are new (and great-sounding) AAA cuts. Just two recent examples:

Herbie Hancock - Mr. Hands

The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Jazz Impressions Of Japan

"(AAA) Lacquers Cut from the Original Analog Tapes by Ryan Smith, Sterling Sound"

 

Just to clarify, they had already determined there was an issue with the Apollos that day so we went through that many of the MDC lacquers, which were already hard to get and of course are now in higher demand than ever. But this gives you some idea of how quickly a studio can use these things up.

Obviously you need one per side. So if it’s a double LP, that’s 4 right there. Blow a side and you’ll have to start over. Need reference or test cuts, that’s another (though you’ll likely use 12” discs for this rather than 14” discs intended for plating, or perhaps an un-cut portion of an already blown lacquer… either way it’s something they’ll need to have on hand)


And if a disc fresh out of the box has defects, that’s one less disc they have to cut a project on. They never get 100% of what they pay for.

So if a mastering studio has at least a couple of projects a day... they’ll eat through their stock pretty quickly. The ones that entirely relied on Apollo - which is most of them - are in big trouble.

 

Any other comments from Joe or others?

Is there nothing yet from industry leaders on how they will address the risk of being down to a single supplier who makes lacquer blanks at a single location?

Will we find that the people involved in a solution won’t be the people under contract with MDC?

 

I found this web 1.0 page of Aardvark Mastering with black and white photos of the Apollo Masters factory, in case anyone is curious: http://www.aardvarkmastering.com/apollo.htm

EDIT: Also on their news page, they said to "Expect delays and possible price increases." From: http://www.aardvarkmastering.com/news.htm

 

just got Aretha Now from VMP which is stickered AAA from mono master...

 

According to an Instagram post by Black Belt Mastering, Levi Seitz mentioned of a "MyShank" diamond cutting stylus that he got from France, which could be used as a replacement for the Transco Stylii?

See here: Levi Seitz on Instagram: “Happy to announce that for the last month I’ve been testing the MyShank diamond stylus and will be using this incredible sounding lacquer…”

 

Apollo Masters was a division of GC International Inc: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gc-international-inc-

Their sister division is A.L. Johnson Co who "provides quality, precision aluminum and zinc castings using the cost effective rubber plaster mold process, providing thin walls, close tolerances and better surface finishes."

It would seem that A.L. Johnson is where they got their aluminum blanks from and that the company is competent enough to rebuild the lacquering facility.