In the mid-20th century, when the LP was the medium of choice, massive hydraulic-powered vinyl pressing machines---manufactured by long-forgotten companies like SMT, Lened, and Toolex---pumped out the endless stream of grooved discs that became the lifeblood of the booming post-war music industry.
When CDs emerged in the mid-1980s, most of those aging LP presses ended up in landfills and warehouses. The rest of the plot unspools like a stale Wes Anderson ensemble. Fueled by millennials feeling nostalgic for something they never experienced, vinyl enjoyed a stunning revival and, defying all pundit predictions, became more than a passing format fad. Smelling money, the Big Three labels rereleased their legacy acts on hot wax, Technics started making SL-1200 turntables again, and vinyl got its own global holiday.
Suddenly those old record presses were in high demand. The 1960s models---clanking, steam-spewing beasts that look like they came straight from Lord Humungus' private record plant somewhere in the post-nuke Australian outback---command insane prices on today's scavenger parts market. But those aging contraptions are the only things keeping the 18 remaining record pressing facilities in the US, and 30 others worldwide, up and running.
All of that is about to change: The first new record-pressing machines built in over 30 years are finally online. The brainchild of some Canadian R&D guys with a background designing fancy MRI machines, the Warm Tone record press is everything that its vintage counterpart is not: safe, fast, fully automated, reliable, run by cloud-based software, and iOS-controlled. These $195,000 whiz-bang machines, the homegrown product of a Toronto company called Viryl Technologies, are the next-gen record presses our 21st century vinyl revolution has been waiting for.
Unlike the old stamping behemoths, a single worker can operate several Warm Tone units at once. Its unrivaled speed and efficiency leaves the standard cycle time benchmarks in the dust, too: 20 seconds versus 35 seconds, which translates to three records per minute instead of only two. That's pretty good, but the actual product yield is even better than that. That's because the old school presses run at a 30 to 40 percent product loss due to everything from operator error to mechanical failure. In order to press a high quality record, a vinyl "puck" must be steam-heated up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and water-cooled down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit in only 22 seconds. Muck those numbers up, and nasty warps are sure to follow. The Warm Tone is so well designed and performs this heating-cooling process so precisely that the vinyl it spits out is uniformly flat. Product loss is a miserly one percent. (Vinyl geeks: A new German pressing machine called Newbuilt hit the market last year, but it's based on less reliable Finebilt tech.)
The Warm Tone is also modular (making repairs literally a snap), mobile-friendly (manufacturing data is instantly relayed to smart devices through a custom interface), and has passed the most rigorous stress tests (24/7 operation is encouraged).
While the press churns away, Viryl Technology's proprietary quality-control software collects data from every vital point in the Warm Tone manufacturing process. The tool also allows the operator to make important tweaks in real time---from changing nozzle and steam pressure to adjusting flywheel trimming speed and vinyl blend---that can mean the difference between a successful run and a budget-breaking failure.
After much planning and infrastructure build-out (aspiring vinyl moguls: don't scrimp on the boiler and closed-loop "chiller" systems), Hand Drawn Records, a 12-man indie label outside Dallas, has just flipped the switch on the first Warm Tones to enter the vinyl supply-side chain. Housed in the Hand Drawn Pressing plant in Addison, Texas, the two machines, currently running 18-hour shifts, are on pace to churn out 1.8 million units in 2017.
"Waffle makers are better today than they used to be because the machines continued to improve," says Hand Drawn Records CCO Dustin Blocker. "Record presses have actually gotten worse because the technology hasn't changed in half a century. The machines are falling apart."
He pauses to let this unconscionable lapse in scientific progress sink in. "It took a while, but we finally have a better record maker."