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posted by on Monday February 06 2017, @10:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-spin-me-right-round,-baby dept.

Ever wondered why you sometimes have to wait months after an album's launch to get the music on vinyl? It's not necessarily because the label hates vinyl — in many cases, it's because the decades-old manufacturing process can't keep up with the format's resurgence. Relief may be in sight for turntable fans, though. Viryl Technologies is producing a pressing machine system, WarmTone, that should drag vinyl production into the modern era.

Much of WarmTone's improvement rests in its use of modern engineering. It's more reliable when producing the "pucks" that become records, makes it easier to switch out stampers (the negatives that press records) and sports a trimming/stacking system that can better handle large-scale production. Also, there's a raft of sensors -- the machine checks everything from pressure to temperature to timing, so companies will immediately know if something goes wrong.

Logically, the interface has been spruced up as well. Touchscreens help control the pressing machine on-site, and workers can check on the state of the machine from their computer or phone.

Source:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/29/vinyl-record-production-tech-upgrade/


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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday February 07 2017, @06:42AM

    by dry (223) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @06:42AM (#463923) Journal

    I remember listening to Dark Side of the Moon on a quad system, 8 track even. It sounded excellent.
    8 track was a funny format, it was actually of sounding quite good but there was sure a shortage of music that managed to sound good on it, probably the record companies cheeping out.

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  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:42PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:42PM (#464600) Homepage Journal

    Yes, it was because the labels were and are stupid. The idiots illogically deemed eight track players for cars, and cassettes for the home, and since cars had shitty acoustics, eight track fidelity fifn't matter.

    On a quad eight track or cassette, the quad would have sounded better than stereo (if you could afford paying twice as much for the equipment) because tape had discrete tracks, but vinyl had to multiplex, resulting in a far lower frequency range.

    Stupid. Eight tracks had twice the transport speed of cassettes, so should have sounded better. Even more stupid is that cassettes are far more portable; one eight track is the same size as four cassettes, and you could buy longer playing cassettes.

    I never had an eight track (although my ex-wife did when I married her). I was using cassettes since 1968, in the car since the early '70s. I always hated the way songs got cut off in the middle on an eight track, which everyone I knew had.

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