Why Our Short-Run Vinyl Sounds Better

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Here’s something most artists don’t realize: our small-run vinyl pressings don’t just cost less — they can also sound a little better than if you do your record pressing elsewhere. Let’s explain why.

Table of Contents:
• The vinyl plating process
• One-step plating
• Stamper wear
• Test pressings (or lack thereof)
• The Disc Makers difference
• Conclusion

The vinyl plating process

Much of our quality comes down to the plating process. Vinyl plating is the process of making the stampers that get mounted in the record press, which contain a negative of the groove shape that gets pressed into each of your records.
After our audio mastering engineers cut your music into a lacquer during the cutting process, that lacquer — containing the grooves with your music — gets electroplated in a nickel solution to create a negative copy made of nickel called a “father.” This is a lacquer being plated. From there, you can replate that father with nickel to make a “mother.” And from the mother, you can make the stampers that get mounted on the press.
That’s the traditional three-step process: father, mother, stamper. And it’s the way to go if you need thousands of copies, because off of each father, you can generate probably at least eight to ten stampers. Each stamper is good for pressing up to a thousand records — maybe a little more sometimes, if plants try to stretch that. However, every extra step in the stamper-making process, from father to mother to stamper, is kind of like making another generation of a tape copy. You risk losing a touch of the high-end detail or adding some tiny imperfections every step you take.

One-step plating

For small orders under 500 copies, we at Disc Makers skip the mother and stamper stage and use the father as the stamper to press your record. That’s called one-step plating, which leads to the purest-sounding record money can buy, because your records are being pressed with the first-generation metal. Now, to be fair, mastering engineers don’t all agree on how much better a record pressed off a one-step stamper really sounds. And indeed, the difference — if you can hear it — is subtle. But one thing the engineers agree on: one-step plating does mean fewer chances for groove information to get lost in translation.

Stamper wear

Disc Makers’ one-step plating is not the only reason your small run of 100, 200, or 300 records will sound its best. There’s another factor at play: stamper wear. You see, the stamper is literally the mold that presses your grooves into hot vinyl. With every record pressed, the stamper wears down ever so slightly from the friction of the vinyl. By the time you get close to a thousand records pressed off of a set of stampers, you can start to lose a little crispness and may hear a touch more surface noise. For major-label pressings, where they try to extract the most possible copies from a set of stampers to keep costs down, you can actually hear slight differences in audio quality depending on whether a record was pressed early during a stamper’s life versus later, when the stamper was already worn.
This is something you don’t have to worry about when you press 100, 200, or even 300 records. You are getting all your records pressed from the very beginning of a stamper’s life, when the grooves are at their sharpest.

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Test pressings (or lack thereof)

One final benefit of doing a small run of vinyl with Disc Makers: if you’re placing a small order of under 500 records, we don’t force you to do test pressings. Instead, while your record is on press, we take a few copies to our quality control room, and we do a careful quality check to make sure that your record sounds good. We call that an in-house test and run. This not only saves you the cost of test pressings, but your turn time is also faster, because we only have to schedule your job and put it on press once, rather than twice — once for the test pressing, and then for the actual production run.
So, if you order 100 records, you’re essentially getting the equivalent of 100 test pressings, except they will be your actual pressings with your record labels, your jackets, and shrink wrap. By the way, in case you’re worried about us checking your sound quality instead of you doing so with a test pressing, let me assure you: we have pressed thousands of album titles with this process. In maybe one or two cases did we ever have a problem with the stamper or a manufacturing glitch. In those cases, we redid the pressings for the artist, because we stand behind our pressing quality.

The Disc Makers difference

Disc Makers is the only plant to routinely do one-step plating for small orders, which lets the records we press sound just a bit sweeter than elsewhere. Why don’t other pressing plants do this routinely? For two reasons. First off, other pressing plants don’t focus on the independent, emerging artists like we do. They live in a world of pressing larger runs for labels and are just in the habit of doing two-step plating for every order. The second reason is that, unlike Disc Makers, other pressing plants don’t cut their own lacquers. Outsourcing lacquer cutting to a mastering studio is expensive, since the highest risk of ruining or smashing a stamper is when you take it off press after making test pressings. Other plants have to be more conservative and do two- or three-step plating, because if they smash a stamper during the test pressing phase, they definitely don’t want to pay to recut lacquers.

In Disc Makers’ case, we don’t like doing recuts either, of course. However, the risk that we smash a stamper is much lower, because we do our in-house test and run. And worst case, since we cut our own lacquers, if there is a problem with a stamper, we can easily recut, because we digitally save all your mastering settings from the mastering session.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the upside of short-run vinyl pressing with Disc Makers is that you get cleaner groove detail from our one-step plating process, which results in the highest sound quality possible for your records. Because your order quantity is small, you get the freshest sound, since your stampers haven’t worn down yet. You get a turnaround time that’s two weeks quicker, since we don’t have to schedule a test pressing and then wait for your approval and schedule the pressing run. And you save money, because doing one-step plating is actually more economical than two- or three-step plating, and we pass those savings along to you.
So if you’re planning to put your music on vinyl, give us a shout for the highest quality and the best prices. When you’re ready, we’re here for you.

You can watch the original version of this blog as part of our Indie Music Minute series on the Disc Makers YouTube Channel.