Zenith Records, Australia’s record presses, & how to press a record
In 1982 the first CD player was sold, and the world began to move away from vinyl records. Record pressing plants around the world shut down, and the companies who owned them did their best to make sure no one else would revive the format. It’s been said that EMI in New Zealand threw their pressing machines into the sea, but others fared slightly better, and though record pressing became less popular, it has continued on.
In the last 30 years Australia has generally only had one or two companies pressing vinyl across the entire country. One of those was Corduroy Records, started in Melbourne by Nick Phillips during the early 1990s after he salvaged machinery which had been due to be scrapped. According to Nick, “As the only vinyl factory in the Southern Hemisphere we singlehandedly saved vinyl record manufacturing in Australia.” But after saving the industry, in 2005 Corduroy and their machinery were sold to Zenith Records which has continued running strong. When I dropped by the plant in East Brunswick co-owner Paul Rigby talked me through the history of their machines.
“Our pressing gear came from a number of sources. The first two presses we had came from an independent pressing plant in Sydney, I think it was Modern , and another one came from Sundown, which was a country label. We’ve got a 1974 VMS 70 Neumann cutting lathe which came from EMI and the galvanics had come from EMI, but since that time we’ve bought new galvanics from England. Essentially Nick Phillips cobbled together a plant for Corduroy which was the backbone of this rig, and since that time we’ve added to that and got it working a lot more reliably.”
Australia had several other pressing plants across the country, with the largests located in New South Wales, such as Festival Records. Their plant in Pyrmont ran between 1966–1992, and during the 1980s it had 26 presses “pumping out 25000 records per day.” EMI had their own pressing plant in Homebush from 1927–1992, and Sony was also nearby in Artarmon, having purchased their factory from CBS (previously ARC), but it closed in 1991.
The 1990s were undoubtably a bad time to run a pressing plant. “Peak Vinyl” is said to have occurred in 1987, when sales in Australia were worth a staggering $80 million. Although there was a revival of sorts, by 2007 vinyl sales were still not great, at around $2 million that year. That was the year The Vinyl Factory opened a pressing plant in Sydney, only for it to close again in 2012.
2012 is also when Australia’s vinyl album sales started growing again, and in 2020 grew to over $29 million. The increasing sales led ARIA to launch a new weekly Vinyl Album Chart in 2018, with ARIA’s Chief Executive Dan Rosen explaining at the time that Australia had renewed their love affair with vinyl, in what he said had been “a phenomenon over the last few years”. At the time of writing the chart was made up of a mixture of new releases and reissued albums such as Queen’s Greatest Hits, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, and Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.
These days vinyl has move beyond just being a way to listen to music, and it’s also about collecting, and displaying the artwork in a time when people now stream most of their music.
A 2016 study found almost half of people who buy vinyl never even listen to it, with 7% of those surveyed not even owning a turntable. But there are still those who are passionate about how their vinyl sounds. Just look at the reviews on record collecting website Discogs and you’ll find people debating surface noise, warps, and whether coloured vinyl really does sound worse.
I asked Paul at Zenith Records about the sound quality of coloured vinyl, and he explained that while it used to be true that they sounded worse, it should all sound the same now. This was because when labels first began experimenting with it, the coloured polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is used to make vinyl, was often not “audio grade” in the same way black PVC is. But now all PVC is the same quality and is originally clear, meaning all vinyl is coloured, even black. Bad pressings can still happen though, and for splatter vinyl releases additional surface noise is always a possibility.
Other than colours, another quirk of vinyl releases are the etchings in the run out groove, the area of a record between the label and where the music ends. At pressing plants like Zenith they will write their catalogue number (which is different from the one used by record labels) and the cutting engineer will add their name as well.
Paul told me they’ve occasionally had some requests for messages along the lines of “Todd is a nob”, but they weren’t done as frequent as someone like George “Porky” Peckham used to, who he says, “mastered the art of the cryptic inscription”.
Porky is perhaps best known for the inscription on Elvis Costello’s 1978 album This Year’s Model which said, “Special pressing №003 Ring Moira on 434 3232 for your special prize”. The message is still being discovered today, with curious record buyers enquiring online what their seemingly rare album is worth, only to find out every single copy had the exact same message. In fact, he had played a similar joke a year earlier for The Monty Python Instant Record Collection.
Other messages left by Porky included “FREE SLY STONE NOW!” and “FREE JAMES BROWN” on Primal Scream’s Loaded EP, and another two messages on Dead Kennedys’ Plastic Surgery Disasters, “1984 HAPPENED IN 1930 — AND WE’RE JUST NOW FINDING OUT ABOUT IT — BLACK RANDY” and “HE WHO MAKES PEACEFUL REVOLUTION IMPOSSIBLE MAKES VIOLENT REVOLUTION INEVITABLE — JOHN F KENNEDY”.
But the record pressing business isn’t all fun, as recently several major releases around the world have had their vinyl shipments delayed, which is said to be in part due to a lacquer shortage.
In the US at the beginning of 2020 a fire at the Apollo Masters Corporation in Banning, California took out a significant portion of the worlds lacquer, a substance required in the production of vinyl records. Apollo was one of only two companies responsible for supplying the entire world and is said to be responsible for around 75% of that supply, with the rest made up by MDC in Japan. Notably most of the UK’s pressing plants sourced their lacquer from MDC, so the fires would affect the US more so than Europe.
Following the fires, the Vinyl Record Manufacturers Association was set up to help “ramp up additional lacquer production plants within the US” and stop US based customers looking to Europe, where new techniques have been developed which don’t require lacquer. Direct Metal Mastering is one such technique and has been around since the 1980s but isn’t as widely available, with only twelve machines capable of the technique said to exist.
There are other changes to vinyl production too, as the industry looks for ways to be slightly more environmentally conscious. These have included Ninja Tune pressing their vinyl at 140g rather than 180g so it’s lighter, making it cheaper to ship and causing a smaller carbon footprint. They’ve also made sure their record sleeves are from sustainably sourced FSC card and paper, and their Berlin and LA offices run on 100% renewable energy.
Elsewhere people have been exploring recycling vinyl. Companies like Zenith keep trimmings and use their rejects to press back into new records, but things get a little bit tricky if you try to recycle records you didn’t press, as you can’t be sure what processes they used. Instead, there are companies developing new technologies to replace PVC, such as The Green Vinyl Records Project who are exploring different environmentally friendly plastics in the Netherlands. Likewise in Austria there is HD Vinyl which hopes to make stampers that last 10,000 times longer than nickel stampers currently in use around the world, and doesn’t require lacquer.
But while things are changing in the world on vinyl, for the consumer in Australia and the rest of the world all the matters is whether that vinyl is available to buy.•
How To Press A Record
After delivering your audio to the pressing plant, a lacquer, or acetate, is made using a lathe cutter. The lacquer looks like a vinyl record but is one sided, so both the A and B side of the final record will need to have their own lacquer cut.
The lacquer is then cleaned and treated before being sprayed with a silver nitrate solution.
Next there’s a process known as electroforming, or electroplating, where the lacquer is bathed in nickel while an electric current is passed through. This leaves the lacquer coated in nickel which fills in the grooves, forming a negative copy of the original when it is removed.
The nickel negative is known as the father, or metal master, and can’t be played on a turntable because it has ridges instead of grooves.
The next step depends on the pressing plant. When I visited Zenith they told me about the
two-step process where the father is processed and turned into a stamper, similar to how the father was made. The stamper is then used to press the records.
This is best for small runs of between 500–1000 records, but for larger runs there is the three-step process.
For this, instead of turning the father into a stamper, another copy is made. This positive copy is called the mother, and from this a new stamper will be made.
This extended process can be useful if a stamper gets damaged, as a new one can be made from the mother. Large record presses would traditionally make 10 mothers from the father, and then 10 stampers from each mother, allowing over 100,000 records to be pressed with near identical audio quality.
Once you’ve got the stamper, a puck, or biscuit, of PVC is heated and placed on a hydraulic press along with the record label. This is then pressed with 120 tonnes, the edges are trimmed away, and the record is placed in a sleeve ready to go.
A test pressing will be made for the customer, and if it’s all ok they’ll print the rest.
When I visited Zenith, they could press a record every 42 seconds, but the first couple are usually rejects as the machine is heating up so warps may occur. These rejects, along with any trimmings, can be recycled back into new records. •
This article was originally published in The Shadow Knows Issue #1, July 2021. Buy the fanzine here or read more at our website.
