Making Black Plastic?

Making Black Plastic?

VinylWe've got a lot of experience working with vinyl lathes.

From this we have a set of special modules that can be added to our consoles to help you cut vinyl, and still get the whole Crookwood purity of path, and efficiency of production.

Many ways to skin a cat

Since the lathes were invented, digital technology has been come of age, and this has offered many ways to cut vinyl.  The dominant problem is the availability of 4 channel devices and analogue delay lines required to do it purely in the analogue domain. In addition now you can store all of a side of vinyl on a DAW without compromise, you don't need the dual recording paths of old needed to do it in real time off master tapes.

Here's some ways we've seen of doing the job:

  • Record the whole processed track in a DAW, copy it, time slip the mod channel and feed it out to 2 stereo DACs.  Monitor off the DAW or the lathe Feedback.
  • Record the whole track in a DAW, play it out through analogue gear add elliptical EQ, into a digital delay, through an RDL into the lathe.
  • Play straight off the incoming media into the record chain, as above
  • Reproduce an original type analogue path.

And so on.

We can help in all of these ways with modern equipment.

Extra modules

Here's a partial list of optional modules we have in our arsenal that can be added to a console to allow it to cut to vinyl:

  • Elliptical EQ: we have a 15 position switched EE in 2 or 4 channel configurations.
  • Analogue level: we have a precision 0.25dB stepped gain stage in 2 or 4 channel configurations.
  • MS/ stereo width: we have a precision MS module that can be used to alter stereo with in 2 or 4 channel configurations.
  • RDL: we have RDL technology that will let you alter the send and return levels in 0.25dB steps, in 2 or 4 channel configurations.
  • Master cut: we have a relay based master cut switch to isolate the lathe  from the console.
  • P&G fader: we have a precision 104mm P&G fader module in 2 or 4 channel configurations.
  • VU meters: we have precision Sifam VU meters, with switched attenuators on them for adjusting the level to the VU range. A cheap RDL unit in some ways.
  • Digital distribution: to sort out the routing of record signals to delays and back to DACs.

As you can see if you want to be serious with vinyl, we have the tools.

Call or email us if you want to know more.