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.
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 it’s 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.
Read more at Wired
Photo credit: CLF via Wikimedia Commons
