HD Vinyl Could Be The Answer To The Vinyl Industry’s Lacquer Crisis

The vinyl industry has been in a tizzy since the Apollo Masters fire that destroyed its plant. The company was the largest supplier of vinyl lacquer masters, which are used in the initial step of vinyl record manufacturing. There is only one other company that manufactures the discs and they are already at capacity. Although this loss has no bearing on records that have already gone through that stage (meaning anything already on the market), it does impact any new projects in the future when lacquer masters are scarce. There may be a solution on the way though, and it’s called HD Vinyl.

HD Vinyl has been working on a process for a couple of years that’s intended to both improve and speed up the process of transferring all the electronic bits of your music onto a vinyl disc. It does this by using a laser, which etches grooves in a ceramic disc instead of the vinyl that’s been used for almost a hundred years now. If this process should come to fruition, it would make the shortage of lacquer masters moot as they would be obsolete anyway.

According to the company, which is still in the R&D stage, “The quality was much better than expected, but the process was too slow and inaccurate for industrial production. Especially stitching errors gave us a headache. We needed to improve the process over the full area of a 12” disc in terms of speed and positioning accuracy.

We found the solution rather unexpectedly at a conference for laser ablation in Japan. There we met the German company ScanLab, which specialized in scan solutions and turns lasers into precise, highly dynamic and flexible tools.

Their XL-Scan technology enables us to move both laser and ceramic plate at the same time. This requires precise synchronization of scanner, stages and laser pulses with special hardware and software. The results are fantastic! Continuous and seamless groove cutting is now many times faster at an unprecedented accuracy.”

As you’ll see in the video, the laser is etching the ceramic disc while the disc is moving.

While this is a giant step forward, there are still production issues to overcome before the process can be taken to the world’s pressing plants. As the company’s release states, “While traditional nickel stampers are fixed with a mechanical mounting ring in the pressing machines, ceramic stampers demand a different solution. Right now we are testing a vacuum to hold the stamper in place. The challenge is to maintain vacuum suction while the mold changes pressure and temperature during the pressing cycle. Furthermore the mold has to fit in every pressing machine used, and switching the mold needs to be easy and without additional costs.”

What could be better. The future of the vinyl industry could be saved with an up-to-date process that improves the quality at the same time. Imagine that!

Find out more about HD Vinyl here.

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