Vinyl lives, and continues to grow

[Brian Roth]

http://www.analogplanet.com/content/garage-sale-find-has-qrp-adding-13-additional-record-presses

Right here in my new home town.

Bri

 

[Spiritworks]

Really nice to see.

 

[JohnRoberts]

When the segment recovers enough that the press manufacturers start making new record presses again then the growth trend really is established. Re-starting old shuttered-in production capacity is not exactly milestone growth. 

Please excuse my sour grapes, I used to sell phono preamps, before some of these new generation vinyl aficionados were born.

JR

PS I even pressed one record (a 45 RPM) for my old kit company as a free handout with my DJ mixer kits (late '70s).  A and B sides were songs provided by a musician friend with his own recording studio. I named my record company "Burning Bird Records"  ;D as a subsidiary of my Phoenix Systems kit business. It was not a profitable record company since I gave away the records. IIRC it cost me $250 for 1k records or something like that.

 

[Brian Roth]

I agree that vinyl production won't return to the levels that we knew back in the 1960's-whenever.  But, back in 2011, Chad Kassem invested serious money to build the new plant from the ground-up.  He bought the building, installed the chilled water and steam systems and rebuilt the old presses he had acquired using industrial microprocessor controls, etc.

They've been running two shifts and are still running weeks/months with backorders.  Chad's planned on adding a third shift for awhile now so the plant will be running 24/7.

http://www.qualityrecordpressings.com/

I recall reading that other plants around the country are also running full tilt as well.


Bri

 

[petermontg]

They wont be online for nearly 1 year. Wont change anything in the next  12/18 months.  massive amount of work there. There was 8 brought online here which took nearly 6 months and they weren't in as bad shape as those. Great find, I hear it took some chunk of change.

 

[leswatts]

Interesting.
I used to design phono cartridges (rather than microphones).
Some want me to do it again, but I just don't think the sales volume would be enough.
The units would be horribly expensive as well.

But I do think back to all the physics and math we put into those things.

Les
L M Watts Technology

 

[JohnRoberts]

Yup, the serious money doesn't see it as more than a fad, or they would be manufacturing new production machinery, not rescuing old soldiers out of storage... 

Where were all these customers when I was making kick ass preamps?

Vinyl is dead, long live vinyl...

JR

 

[Gold]

Interesting.
I used to design phono cartridges (rather than microphones).
Some want me to do it again, but I just don't think the sales volume would be enough.
The units would be horribly expensive as well.

I have been looking for someone who can do a run of cartridges with a bifrucated stylus to play stampers. Stanton was the only manufacturer to make one AFIK and there are none hiding at Stanton.

There would be some money in it. I know the Library of Congress is looking for them and I know others who want them.

Interested?

 

[PRR]

> cartridges with a bifrucated stylus

That's a job for a gem-cutter, not a cartridge maker. The hard bit at the end is the only difference.

I have no idea how Stanton used to cut those bubbie-needles. (The standard conical point is trivial, and elliptical is a minor complication.) Find the old-timer who remembers that machine.

 

[Gold]

That's a job for a gem-cutter, not a cartridge maker. The hard bit at the end is the only difference.

I know an old timer who designed cartridges for Stanton. I asked him. He said "find someone to make the stylus". I haven't looked very hard because i don't actually need one, although I'd like one. I was hoping Les might know how to get that done.

The stylus could be fitted on any reasonably good cartridge. It's for QC.

 

[leswatts]

Paul, I could get into gemcutting/styli. It wouldn't be the first time. It would be expensive.
PM me.

On another note...after reading this I checked something. A lot of the performance of the phono cartridges
I used to design came from the beryllium cantilevers. So for grins I requested a quote for 0.005" pure Be
foil. It was about $850 per square inch. That's what we used previously.

AlBeMet is not a contender BTW.

Les
L M Watts Technology

 

[Gold]

I think the price and availability of beryllium was the reason Shure discontinued the V-15.

 

[PRR]

> price and availability of beryllium

JBL had Beryllium 4" diaphragms in a driver. I had five. It was soon discontinued for a Titanium(?) version. Beryllium is just too toxic to work with (buried inside 21 pounds of Alnico hung 30' up it was not dangerous). Even the military moved away from Beryllium.

But not the problem. If Stanton (or whoever is still in the racket) felt there was any market >few, and that you had the female gems, they could pull styli off the line before mounting male gems for you to mount, or even accept your gems to run on their gem-mounter.

The obvious problem is that-- we have you, and the LoC, and..... who? Lifetime demand about two? A dozen if all your friends and the LoC take two each? If a gem-cutter was sitting in your shop, it might be doable, but to re-invent the process plus round-up buyers is real work and time. The way digital imaging is going, you could shoot the stamper with a 133GB iPhone camera and let an algorithm tell you the state and content of the ridge.

 

[leswatts]

I don't know what's up with the beryllium. It was expensive when we used it at Shure in the '80s, but not like now.
I suspect most of the price is overhead for all the regulatory stuff required to work with it. Probably agencies just don't want
you to have it either, as it's used in a key component of nuclear weapons (initiator).

I note I have to fill out a bunch of forms to get it now...prob background check.

We considered it toxic only as a dust back then. Now, who knows.

It's amazingly high specific stiffness allowed some spectacular performance in audio products though. I'd love to make some 25mm dome tweeters with it!

I'm trying to remember back at the best I could do with the thinwall tube and superlight styli in the Shure development lab.
Some of the cartridges we'd cobble up had spectacular performance but were too fragile to be a product.
I seem to recall being able to track well over 100 cm/s in the midrange at a small fraction of a gram tracking force. We had a souped up Westrex cutter head that could do that, even without half speed stuff.

At $850/sq in speaker and mic Be diaphragms are just out, period. You could still do it with phono, since each cantilever would require only 0.1 sq in or less. I'd do it again if I thought there was a market. (I don't) Toxicity regs probably nix the whole thing.

Beryllium is VERY hard to form. We knew how though.

Les

 

[leswatts]

Oh, forgot. The female stylus. I think the way to do that is to lap off the sides of two standard styli and affix them side by side.
I'll bet that's how it was done. Still some gemcutter work, but just simple flats.

I'd probably put it on a M97 because it's still made and i'm familiar with it. I used that basic design for some Radio Shack/Shure cartridges.

We're talking about it. It will be very expensive but doable I think. Need to make at least ten.

 

[Gold]

As of October I am the proud owner of the Shure Neumann AM131 that was used to make all the test records. It was modified for 1/3 speed cutting! Never seen that before.

I think I could get rid of about 10 units. Expensive is okay. The customers will be the LoC, pressing plants, restoration specialists. All people willing to pay for unobtanium. Stanton was the only one who made them. I bet it was a special request. Not too many people need to play stampers, even back then. You also need a backwards spinning turntable and magnetic hold down. Stanton made a stamper player too. I have one.

I like the M97. Sounds like a plan.

 

[leswatts]

You have our old lathe?? Cool!!!
We had recorded Sergio Mendes Mais que Nada on that I recall. The sibilants
were 30 cm/sec +. Nothing at the time could track it except our stuff.

Never played stampers.

Please PM your email and we'll continue.

Les

 

[Gold]

My email address is in the last PM I sent. You can always get to it through my website in my signature.

I was incredibly impressed with Shure when I visited. Everyone said how much they like their job unsolicited. It sounds like they treat people right. Any company that keeps a full time archivist on staff can't be all bad. I was so happy to see a large American audio engineering firm doing so well in such a nice way.

 

[PRR]

> lap off the sides of two standard styli

That simple? I was looking at it in my mind and was not sure this duplicates the groove-playing contact action. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't but the ideal shape would be an impossible Mobeus? And holding two diamonds to the grinder doesn't seem very hard (compared to getting an elliptical cone in the first place).

If everybody at Shure loves their job so much, they should listen. They can see that there's no phono cartridges without records, which means stampers, and being able to test-play stampers is a very nice thing for cutter and stamper mechanics to have.

Not sure how the LoC comes in. If they have stampers that they dunno what's on them, seems to me they could set up a small press and one-off a groovy disk to play normally. But having the LoC interested gives the idea heavy respectability.

 

[ricardo]

I don't know what's up with the beryllium. It was expensive when we used it at Shure in the '80s, but not like now. ...

...  It's amazingly high specific stiffness allowed some spectacular performance in audio products though. I'd love to make some 25mm dome tweeters with it!

We actually made some experimental 25mm dome treble units using Russian Be at Wharfedale.

Price wasn't an issue cos the alternative was a 'diamond-like ceramic' from Sumitomo.  First breakup was comparable .. 30+kHz IIRC ... but the Be dome was easier to damp.

We chose the ceramic for marketing and 'Hand-carved by Virgins' reasons.  Other companies, eg Yamaha, had Be.

Wharfedale R&D weren't really fans of hard domes but we designed & made large numbers of some of the best.
I think the Library of Congress has cornered the World's existing supply of V15-5s