
Manufacturing plant fire threatens worldwide vinyl record supply - gscott
https://pitchfork.com/news/devastating-manufacturing-plant-fire-threatens-worldwide-vinyl-record-supply/
======
Jerry2
Apparently, there were two companies in the US that produced the lacquer but
then consolidation happened and Apollo bought out the competitor and shut it
down. [1]

> _Gil Tamazyan, the owner of Los Angeles record pressing plant Capsule Labs,
> said he 's been concerned for the industry since Apollo purchased competitor
> Transco in 2007._

> _" The worst case from (the fire) would be if Apollo doesn't plan to return
> and doesn't share the intellectual properties with another new willing
> company. We all agree there needs to be more than one supplier for these
> materials," Tamazyan said. "All my industry colleagues are worried this
> might take a long time to figure out and, in the process, major delays may
> arise in the vinyl production market."_

So now only the Japanese company, MDC, remains as the sole producer of the
lacquer. Lacquer is basically a formulation of nitrocellulose and is highly
flammable.

If you've never seen a lacquer master being cut, give this vid a watch [2].
Not surprisingly, the audio engineer uses the Apollo lacquer master in the
video.

[1] [https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2020/02/07/apollo-
maste...](https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2020/02/07/apollo-masters-fire-
vinyl-records/4692215002/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8bhzob0fQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8bhzob0fQ)

------
eganist
I haven't found an objective explanation for why some populations prefer vinyl
analog over any digital renditions of a sound. Can anyone share some insight?

(I've listened to both, and the description of vinyl or even analog sound as
being generally "warmer" never resonated with me.)

~~~
bonestamp2
I do both. Digital music is way more convenient to initiate, continue, store
and take with you -- so I use that the most. But, it's almost too convenient
in some cases to the point where I often don't appreciate what is really
happening and the music just becomes background noise. Although it's obviously
possible, I rarely use digital music to sit and listen to an entire album
anymore.

On the other hand, when I listen to a record, I sit down and I listen to the
record. I mean, you kind of have to do that anyway because you only get a few
songs before you have to flip it. I find it makes me more mindful of the
music; I feel more in-the-moment; and it reminds me of my youth. That was a
time when we couldn't just tell our phone to start playing an AI curated
playlist while everyone talks over it anyway. I'm not convinced we would we
have wanted to do that either...

People rarely talk about music anymore, compared to what it used to be like.
We used to line up when a new album was coming out from a favorite artist.
We'd take the tape or cd from our car, into our bedroom, over to our friend's
houses, and blast it on our parent's floor speakers before they came home from
work. We used to talk about that album for days, sometimes months as we got
deeper into it after many replays. I can't remember the last time I had a good
conversation about a new album... few seem to care anymore. A lot of people
will blame the music, but there is still some great music being made today.

Maybe it's the medium.

~~~
WifeDuringLawti
I think it's more likely your age group. When you were young listening to
tapes on your parents' speakers, didn't it seem to you that kids and teens
were much more into music than most adults?

I'm 20, I grew up listening to albums on YouTube, never owned a CD, tape, or
record. But my experience is and was still exactly what you describe. My
friends and I have countdowns on our phones ticking down the days to eagerly-
awaited releases, we make plans to listen to it together at a 'premiere'
hosted by whoever has the best speakers. If they live up to the excitement
they get replayed to death, memorized backwards and forwards, and discussed
endlessly. In middle/high school we'd write our own reviews to post online and
sometimes get the artist replying to us on Twitter which made our month. The
fact that we didn't have to buy a 4"-by-4" piece of plastic and put it into
another piece of plastic before hitting play didn't prevent any of that and I
can't imagine it making the music more exciting or engaging.

~~~
bonestamp2
> I think it's more likely your age group.

I agree, that's certainly part of it and I'm happy to hear that young people
are still obsessed about music. I'm not suggesting you need physical media to
do it, but I am saying the medium has changed things to some degree.

Back then, if we wanted a mix tape, we'd have to mix it. Now, spotify
generates five new ones each day for each of us, or we can request a new one
on the fly for any genre, mood, artist, etc. So, it makes me wonder how these
tools have changed the way young people today consume music. For example, how
much of your digital listening is to entire albums start to finish vs some
kind of mix/random play? What are you doing (if anything) while you listen to
a complete album? Are you buying albums specifically or listening to them on a
subscription service?

~~~
mlang23
When I tried spotify a few years ago, it was exactly this aspect that totally
failed my expectations. I wanted a service like Spotify as a replacement for
genre radio. I wanted something that somehow figures out my tastes, and
generates a mix for me. In my experience, this totally fails unless you happen
to like the most commercial pop music available. Whenever I tried to coax it
to play some alternative and undergroundy music, it ended up playing the most
commercial nonsense after 2 or 3 tracks. I haven't tried a single streaming
service since, because I dont feel I want to be poisoned by the most empty and
stupid music in existance.

~~~
tomduncalf
I suspect you didn’t use it for long enough for it to develop a good profile
of your tastes. I’ve been using it for 5 years and the recommendations are my
favourite feature, and on the whole very impressive.

I’d consider myself into quite underground music (electronic/techno, nothing
mainstream or commercial at all, I’d wager even most people who consider
themselves into electronic music wouldn’t have heard of a lot of the artists I
listen to) and it usually gets it pretty right, sometimes amazingly so.

I’ve been introduced to some of my favourite music by Spotify, and the
interface makes exploring related artists etc. really easy. Ideally I’d like
better cataloguing (e.g. tagging) and metadata (e.g. more emphasis on labels)
but I know I’m a niche user and I can work around these limitations.

My tips if you try it again would be:

\- if it recommends something you don’t like, press thumbs down (if available)
and skip - they use skipping as a signal you don’t like something

\- build up a collection of music you do like, using the save button and/or
playlists

\- check out the feature which plays related music after you’ve finished
listening to a track or album - this often finds the most interesting music
for me

\- check out the “related songs” area under any playlists you’ve created. If
you have focussed playlists (e.g. I have ones for different subgenres), this
can help you discover some great stuff.

I’d actually say the stuff Spotify plays after an album/song is the best part
of their recommendations for me. The daily mixes it generates aren’t bad.
Release Radar and Discover Weekly can be a bit hit or miss, sometimes for
example it will recommend overly commercial stuff for my tastes, but it’s
always worth scanning through (and I do thumbs down the really off
recommendations).

It’s not perfect of course, for example sometimes I find it gets “stuck” in a
small subset of artists after a while, but combined with other sources and
some input to guide, Spotify is the best service I’ve found for discovering
music, and is way above for example YouTube suggestions

~~~
7thaccount
Is there a good service that doesn't require FB?

~~~
Vinnl
How about Spotify? It doesn't require FB.

~~~
7thaccount
I thought it did and recall the login required a FB account.

~~~
Vinnl
You can try signing up right now - it offers Facebook as an option, but also
to create a fresh account. My account is not connected to Facebook.

------
stereolambda
Don't forget that some "obscure" music is marginally cheaper/easier to obtain
on vinyl. For example space age pop, which is one of things in the sweet spot
for collecting (for pleasure, not for money): used to be popular and mass-
manufactured, now almost no one cares, so the market has a lot of this
relatively cheap. Living in the former communist country, I regret not having
easy access to heaps of Western vinyls in Goodwills and such, but at least
seller awareness is not that high.

Also, records are psychologically so much nicer to own. They are large and so
is the artwork. Pretentious/ridiculous liner notes are great. Having them set
up to sound on par with digital (I don't claim to have means or ear to achieve
true "audiophile" sound) is a PITA and requires some money or
hustling/tinkering (that's me). You have gear maintenance, cleaning etc. But
it's a little hobby in itself.

There is also interesting things about the vinyl itself you start to notice.
Up to about 1960s the material was thicker, and then starts the progression
toward the "floppy" vinyl from 1980s (although some state publishers in my
country used the old style even then, great production quality also). Nowadays
vinyl is thick and heavy again and probably better produced than ever. But it
also became a semi-luxury product so it's almost never worth it, at least for
me. I have some new records that they messed up in manufacturing but I'm sure
it also happened back in the day.

~~~
sonthonax
I think a lot of millennials who formed their music taste in the age of
Napster, LimeWire, Torrents and Spotify seem to think the internet has
everything (given the illusion of limitless choice).

This is of course not the case and there's so much music that's only
realistically available on vinyl.

~~~
sp332
The situation is even crazier if you look at fragile shellac 78-RPM records.
The Internet Archive teamed up with the George Blood company to preserve as
many as they can - and they're up to 165,000 records available for streaming
from the Archive!
[https://archive.org/details/georgeblood](https://archive.org/details/georgeblood)

------
eternalny1
Sounds like a good business to get into.

Only two companies in the world that produce this lacquer, and when one of
them burns down it leads to a global shortage?

------
dukoid
I never understood the hype for vinyl records -- they aren't that much better
than CDs when compared to shellac...

~~~
numpad0
CD is way overrated. Terrible, even.

Like, if you compare film to digital photography, but film was represented by
ISO160 monochromatic Kodak, and all the digital photographic technology was
represented by a 640x480 prototype camera from 2001, instead of a RED or even
a yesteryear phone, then it’ll be immediately obvious that analog far
outperforms digital full stop.

That’s how vinyl remains “superior”. _CD_ is terrible, not digital
quantization playback in general, but because it represents “digital” somehow
anyway, analog wins.

~~~
sterwill
This doesn't make any sense. You haven't explained how CD is "terrible"; you
just made some comparison to an obsolete digital camera. You put the CD in,
press play, and a nearly perfect representation of the source signal with
enormous dynamic range and clarity comes out of your DAC. How is this like a
20 year-old digital camera?

~~~
numpad0
Well, at very least, Compact Disc is a 1980 standard... not like 20 years old,
more like 40 years old. I don't understand why statement like above is met
with a response like yours. It's a shitty '80s format that beat vinyl in
affordability, why defend it as if CD is the pinnacle of digital recording
technology? It is not, never was. Just say yeah CD sucks you gotta try DSD,
and move on.

Anecdotal but I feel some sort of acoustic 'odor' to CD, that no other digital
formats have: CD rips and even CD-DSD conversion has distinct tone that tells
the data had been on a disc. Something's wrong with the standard and/or its
mastering.

~~~
cormacrelf
CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If
you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the
mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately
changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific
mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have
golden ears.

For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would
dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some
saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio
not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the
material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to
sound good on iPhone earbuds.

(The usual article cited in these discussions is
[https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-
young.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html), which
happens to make this point briefly under "Different media, different master"
and "Better masters". Edit: another fun article is
[https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-
cd-...](https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-quality-
is-still-great-16518/), with the fantastic pull quote, "There is no safe
listening level to hear the difference between these files".)

CD doesn't need to be the pinnacle of digital technology, because our ears
don't know any different beyond it.

~~~
numpad0
Did you know: Nyquist sampling theorem assumes, and only applies to, pure sine
waves.

Apparently this is a novice level knowledge in DSP community at StackExchange:
[https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable-
sampl...](https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable-sampling-
rate-for-triangle-wave)

~~~
unlinked_dll
The Shannon-Nyquist theorem doesn't assume or apply just to sines (that's a
gross mischaracterization of the proof and it's implications). It assumes
ideal samplers and reconstruction filters can exist, which they can't.

In the real world, ADCs and DACs' inherent filtering, noise, and distortion
characteristics are quantifiably superior to any analog storage media and
reproduction system.

------
Animats
Somebody should come out with 12 inch analog optical disks. Big, thick, solid
things.

~~~
Figs
They did that in the late 70s. They were called LaserDiscs and held about 60
minutes of video per side in the most common encoding format.

~~~
happycube
Some LD trivia:

\- It was the only consumer format that provided standard NTSC/PAL SD video
without reformatting. Macrovision didn't work on them either so there's no
copy protection.

\- Most LD's have digital sound, which literally _is_ CD audio - not just the
bitrate but the analog encoding and digital metadata as well.

\- The disks were expensive to produce (a dual-sided disk in low/moderate
quantity was about $20) and if the glue wasn't done Just Right, the disk would
degrade/rot over time. (The majority of surviving disks are just fine today...
but some of particular interest to people, like the Domesday disks, aren't!)

------
altitudinous
There are probably a dozen people looking into it right now - demand > supply
= a good business, able to set price.

The vinyl record supply will be back to normal in no time.

------
ydb
Vinyl records are perhaps one of the best examples of commodity fetishism; in
fact, they perfectly illustrate Mark Fisher's notion of "lost futures" (by way
of Derrida's hauntology). Even the discussion and detailed analysis of vinyl
(so as to justify its supposed acoustic superiority) is to miss the forest for
the trees.

Of course the rabid capitalists on this forum would fall over themselves to
exploit this for financial gain. There may even be quite a few who see this
sociopathy as a badge of honour.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8ibrfXvpQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8ibrfXvpQ)

~~~
ianleeclark
> Vinyl records are perhaps one of the best examples of commodity fetishism

Could you spell this one out because a vinyl record, in and of itself,
wouldn't be an example of commodity fetishism because the fetishism depends
upon social relations.

------
__m
Dozens of people will be affected by this, a tragedy

