- in Gear , Hardware , Media , Vinyl by Bobby Owsinski
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This New Robot May Change Vinyl Record Pressing Forever
We’ve been hearing about vinyl record manufacturing coming into the future for some time, and here’s another example. Some Canadian design engineers who usually put their R&D talents into things like MRI machines went to work on the vinyl record press. They made some huge improvements and came up with the Warm Tone vinyl record press.
What’s cool about the Warm Tone press is that so many pain points of the record making process are improved, not just one. Everything from the way the vinyl puck (the piece of plastic before it becomes a record) is warmed and formed to the way the finished record is picked up off the press has been improved. As a result, you now have a high-tech device that’s much more efficient than anything that’s come before.
You always hear that word “efficient” thrown about, but in this case it’s a huge improvement that can end up saving the customer (you, the artist) money.
The typical old-school record press has a 30 to 40% failure rate, meaning that for every 1,000 records pressed, 300 to 400 are bad and must be recycled thanks to everything from operator error or mechanical failure. The Warm Tone is down near 1%!
It’s faster too, spitting out 3 records per minute versus less than 2 from the old system.
All this from a machine that’s iOS operated by a single technician for every 4 presses, as compared to the normal one technician for every press.
The bottom line is that every though each press costs $195,000, it should actually bring the cost of making a record down, and speed up the manufacturing as well. If you’re suffering from a long wait time for your vinyl album to be pressed (as long as 4 months in some cases), then hopefully that wait time can chopped down to something bearable soon.